


Times that Taint

by Aenigmatic



Category: Mulan (1998), Mulan - All Media Types
Genre: Disney Mulan, Gen, Other, mulan - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-05
Updated: 2020-09-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:28:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 29,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26300422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aenigmatic/pseuds/Aenigmatic
Summary: Mulan returns home, injured, identity still concealed after the avalanche battle with the Huns. Five years later, she finds herself back in a soldier's garb, in a twist of events that she never could have foreseen.An alternate take that plays around with the 1998 Disney version and the gritty, original Chinese legend. Extensively revised and re-written.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 81





	1. Where Peace Went

**Author's Note:**

> When this was posted a long, long time ago on FF.net (the platform on which I began my fledgling stories), I swore never to touch my early works again. Yet here we are. I can't deny that the latest release of the live-action Mulan movie is forcing me to take a hard look at my own works and what I'd been up to nearly 20 years (!) ago and how things have changed, and how time has flown. 
> 
> This is simply coming up on AO3, because I don't quite want to leave it in the dark. So here is the story again, extensively re-written and revised.

_The Middle Kingdom, Autumn, 612 A.D._

The glint of tarnished silver caught the fading rays of the autumn sun as the familiar birdsong wafted a melody through the half-opened window.

Further in the distance, the ploughs finally rested, the bountiful harvest neatly tucked away in the sheds for a restful winter when the women went indoors to spin and gossip and the men stole some waking hours to drink with their companions.

_So this was peace. A period cherished so fiercely only because it was all but transient._

The sword hung vertically on the wall above her bed. It was an unremarkable sight, except for the fact that its pointed tip faced the pillow on which she lay her head.

In the silence of her bedroom, the memories flowed fast, violent and brutal: of the early days when she’d been the weakest of the lot, when the training first began, when the Captain had single-handedly bested her time and again in hand-to-hand combat, when the siege finally began.

_Ping._

_Fa Mulan._

_Fa Ping._

Identities that she’d surprisingly slipped between when the occasion had suited her, like a mantle that she’d wear when the need arose.

Who did she answer to?

Fa Ping was the name that needed retiring the moment she’d stepped past the boundary demarcating her small village, an identity to shed the moment the wheat and millet fields came into sight several _li_ away from the mountain pass.

Mulan made to arrange the sword—a fussy movement that was done because its position made her restless somehow.

It hung either too low, too high, too…confronting.

She lifted it again and shifted, the slight movement making her wince. Through the free-flowing (feminine) garment she wore, the bandages still acted as constraining reminders of the war she’d limped home from, along with the splintered ideas of what _home_ and _away_ meant, of what women and men could or should do.

Then, a sharp pain before a slight patch of red bloomed beneath the bandage.

A startled laugh burst out of her. When had she become this delicate thing who bled at the slightest, like the flower vase of a moniker that she’d chosen?

The answer came immediately: ever since she stepped back home and into the welcoming heat of the burning fires, her belly full with food and a warm bed beneath her.

Moving the cloth aside, she winced at the red, mottled and angry scars, some still oozing blood.

They hurt like hell, the puckered skin barely healing as she’d slipped in and out of fitful slumber that always rode the edge of sanity—where war cries and bloodshed were all she saw.

Her father had never spoke of war or of the petty skirmishes that had him in his younger years disappear from home for months at a time. As the only son of his own family, what choice did she have but to offer a fervent prayer that his piety and honour to his family rivalled his absolute loyalty to the emperor’s.

He’d merely returned each time with the skin around his mouth more puckered and tense, the dark circles beneath his eyes that became a permanently fixture. Until the very last time, when his body had finally given out. Questions that she’d asked about his injuries and time away out of a child’s innocent and naïve curiosity were merely deflected with a pained smile that she couldn’t comprehend.

But Mulan knew better now.

Struck by that same nameless, wordless inability to speak about war like it was a heroic thing to boast about when the ghosts of the past never stopped their nightly haunts, she finally understood her father’s reticence to talk.

Shaking off the tendrils of the memory took a momentous effort that was immensely helped by the shrill call of her mother.

The simple act of standing was itself an achievement.

Moving to the table? It was another story that required the help of someone else. But it was getting more easily by the day, especially when the delicious smell coming from the kitchen was motivating enough.

Dinner—always a family affair, whether subdued or raucous—beckoned and there was no place for such morose talk at the wooden table. Politics was discussed in bland, vague language and past the variable threshold of tolerance, Fa Zhou had tended to shut all conversation down apart from making even blander comments on the dish of the day.

Even her jovial grandmother, quietened down considerably when that happened.

Her mother bustled in without warning, chattering about everything inconsequential—the heat of the stove, the softness of the cooked millet, the frigid air that warned of winter’s imminent arrival—her smile widening as she slipped her shoulder under her daughter’s armpit and efficiently hauled the both of them to the next room where Fa Zhou already sat waiting.

Her father’s loud, rumbling voice filled the space.

“Sit, daughter and eat.”

It was a line that Fa Zhou hadn’t ever said before, until she returned, then he said it every day. At first, it’d been a source of strength as it obliquely pointed to the fatherly approval Mulan never knew she’d craved, easing her into a domestic routine that she’d once eagerly sought to escape from.

A chirp bird at the window sill tore her attention from the food as it spread its wings and took off.

She turned her head to look at it, ignored the lingering pain from her wounds and watched the space where it stood, long after it had gone.


	2. The Decorations on His Breast

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We have a crumbling Middle Kingdom, the transition time between 2 Dynasties and the early unity that Emperor Wen (Or Wen Di, 'Di' simply meaning Emperor in Mandarin) had achieved was short-lived when his son Yang Di ascended the throne under suspicious circumstances. 
> 
> Yang Di was a slave to luxuries and the good life, building capitals in Luoyang and Chang-an (modern day Xi'An), and the price paid for these was probably the peace of China itself. So we are back to the days of Hun threats, along with some internal trouble brewing.

_The Middle Kingdom, Spring, A.D. 615_

There was no cheering crowd, no raucous noise the way it was in the last few festivities, all of which he would now gladly welcome, seeing as it was one of the few remaining things that out-thundered the disquiet that was now a constant companion.

The medal that was hung on his shoulder had been bestowed in near silence, under the most tragic of circumstances, on the deathbed of the previous Marshal, not during a roar of jubilation that normally accompanied it.

Marshal Li Shang—yet another step up from where he was previously—from Captain, to General and finally to Marshal, paced the barren ground on which the tents were pitched, finally swinging himself onto the upper ledge that was partially shielded by the willow trees, perching comfortably in an irregular shaped nook.

It would have satisfied the most ambitious of soldiers, had they also experienced the same meteoric rise the way he had. He wondered if the Middle Kingdom was truly desperate for warrior leaders, in the hurried way that soldiers were thrown into the disarray of political troubles as keepers of the precarious peace that now seemed to be gradually but indisputably disintegrating.

Shang loved the peace that the night offered, even if the tranquillity was a mere façade. It was the only time that he guarded jealously as one would guard a beautiful wife; it offered the almost physical pleasures that accompanied the inconsistent spurts of memories and solemn meditations.

They had conferred upon the once ruddy and fresh-faced Captain Li Shang many honours for the military campaigns that the Sui Emperors had initiated, but he found that 5 years spent in unceasing warfare had made these honours merely hard stones, casting aside the medals carelessly that he once wore with pride. These medals commended nondescript soldiers who fought well, elevating them, rewarding them, but ate at and stole their souls with every ascension in rank.

That covetous prize and reward that had been bestowed upon him now slung, bundled over his shoulder concealed. The Emperor's sword which had the governing principles of the warrior's code: integrity, honour, loyalty, justice–superlatives describing excellence and nobility in all areas—all calligraphically engraved along its slender silver spoke of one of the greatest honour that a soldier may carry on himself.

It brought great satisfaction and victory surely, to the one who thrust the tip of the sword deep inside an adversary, the repeated purification of the code of honour complete as blood seeped inside the intricate engravings, demanding perfection from the warrior just as those words were in themselves perfect. Surely that code was also the parameter that defined the moral psychology of the warrior, but the sheer effort in maintaining the façade of perfection had also near cost him his sanity.

Yang Di's command was no more than a joke. It was all but an open secret, the liabilities and the bleeding losses that the capital had endured inevitably making for juicy embellished tales particularly when wine was imbibed.

The emperor only cared for the sustainability of his sybaritic lifestyle in Luoyang and Xi'an, revelling in the past fatness of economic prosperity. His military orders since the failed invasion of Gokuryo was merely a formality to station his troops around the borders of his shrinking empire, proving a difficult fact to accept when earnest men threw their lives away meaninglessly for his hallowed name’s sake.

Those who showed sufficient daring to voice their dissenting opinions were never heard from again. Wasn’t the emperor after all, a godsend, an untouchable being who _made_ the decrees?

It happened so often now that Shang didn’t even bother to give credence to rumours of life imprisonment and Yang Di’s inventive methods of torture when talk like this came around.

Still, Chi Fu had been spitefully regular in his appointments, delivering order after order of the Emperor, the latest one bringing him out into the thawing ice and swelling rivers, into the lowland plains lying adjacent to the entrance of the infamously breachable Tung Shao Pass, the white capped mountains a mocking contrast to the great amount red blood spilt at its feet.

Battle-weary when he was not yet thirty, Shang did not think it bode well. He swore softly at the moon rays that flitted gently through the slight canopy of the trees as a jagged peak pierced his vision and triggered a sudden memory 5 years ago, the way that peak was made to trigger off an avalanche.

_Ping._

The flower vase. And the oddest name for a boy.

It was hardly any wonder that the child grew into his name and had at first sight, physically resembled the vase—its porcelain beauty and its delicate fragility.

But there was strength and stubbornness too, and an unbreakable will that seemed to have held porcelain together.

Amidst all the astonishing acts that the boy had achieved in his short time during service that had been embedded in Shang’s memory, their pained, awkward farewell was one that stood out the most.

 _Captain Li,_ Ping had insisted weakly, through that alarmingly pale face of his, _please, follow me no more. Let me make the rest of the journey home myself._

Yet with such bravery under his coat, that boy had cried bitterly as his wound festered, begging to go home, a request and plea that had both saddened and surprised him.

It was confounding to say the least.

That same, strange and elusive boy-soldier who had bested him finally in the art of war despite the rare slight frame that rivalled the thinnest boy in the Middle Kingdom, and injured his side in that glorious moment as the ice rolled down—simply missed home and eschewed what was surely the highest of military honours that awaited him at the capital.

Ping had never told him the exact name of the village in which he lived. Fa Zhou, the war veteran who was Ping’s father, had chosen to settle in obscurity and surround his remaining days with constructed serenity, in what he believed to be the perfect compensation after years of unrest.

Shang had watched motionless, as Ping's horse supported his owner's slight figure in its calming trot, disappearing into the passes of the mountains. Try as he might, he could not shrug off that singular memory the same way he easily shrugged off his outer coat. But that boy had never been –

Hurried footsteps wilted prematurely his blooming memories.

"Marshal!"

He turned, ears ready, body tensed.

"Villages 300 _li_ of the Pass have been razed. The fortified borders have been torn. The Huns come."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Hua Ping/Fa Ping = Flower Vase in Mandarin


	3. The Armour She Dons

_The Middle Kingdom, Spring, A.D 615_

The buckle was tight, her hair was once again shorn and she could not control the involuntary wince that twisted her face.

It was not so much as her appearance that now bothered Mulan; it was more of the lingering and tormenting reminder that she was once again alone as she had been in that army camp those years ago.

The company she’d had in the last five years had inured her to the singular, soul-piercing loneliness was all but history now—a reality that bore getting used to immediately.

By instinct Mulan turned towards the vanity table and—

There was regrettably, no mirror to stare into, or face paint that she’d gradually learned to use in a room that barely held its shape. Instead, there was a partially collapsed roof, a ruined kitchen and a large, gaping hole where her parents and brother slept.

And yet, her room had miraculously held fast, and the pit where she’d kept the old armour still intact. Putting it on again was unlike the last time: she did not have her father’s place to take, no more family to honour.

It was solely by choice now, the only path forward.

But the fit of the armour was familiar, the sword by her side a comforting legacy and the slight musky scent from her warrior's boots quietly nostalgic. One did not need the aid of a mirror to see reflections of her tanned, weathered hands and experienced-creased eyes.

There was nothing left for her now except for memories, most recently of the day she’d left her village for an errand and returned to find the blackened and burnt skeletons of her parents, her brother, her grandmother—the entire village’s worth of people and their livestock—littering the blackened ground.

Sparing a last glance around what used to be her room and she walked out, her feet automatically taking her to the hastily-constructed and makeshift graves covered by dirt and ash.

Mulan knelt the low mounds, swallowing the black rage that threatened to boil over.

Wooden sticks marked their burial mounds, but in a short time, even these would be swallowed up by the harsh climate, their bodies once more swallowed by the very earth they tilled. It was an injustice and almost a desecration of their living testimonies, that they had been denied proper burials because of the unexpected, sudden Hun invasion. There was no proper altar at which she could kneel and present her offerings in the years to come, no physical remembrance or markers that could withstand the test of time.

She sifted from the dust a long and small burnt piece of wood and with it, traced just two words names over the mute earth mounds.

_Jia. Jia-ren._

Home. Family.

The wind would blow these indentations away, or the rain, when it came, would wash these clean. But these ephemeral carvings marked them in death as they were in life, and it was, for now, enough.

What she’d last remembered of them was the domestic cycle of routine: her mother, fanning the flames over the stove top, her father limping out to the fields, her brother chasing the chickens, her grandmother busy with the day’s laundry.

Had they suffered for long before they gave up their last breaths? If they’d died instantly, had their deaths been painless?

The grief she felt was incomprehensible, impossible to reconcile. Reality now dictated she had gone within the span of a day, from a unit of five to one.

_How—why?_

Absently, Mulan rubbed at her chest. The pain there still throbbed in waves.

When she’d returned to the village and saw its ruins, she had swung between sobbing ugly tears and simply needing to breathe as the world became a haze. Then she’d picked up a shovel and dug deep, beads of sweat rolling down her face, the exertion from digging their final resting places making her heave. Shovel had met earth with a fury until her calluses tore and the skin of her palms bled. But stopping was not an option until their bodies were gently laid in them, then darkness had shuttered her eyes and blacked everything out.

Mulan woken on her side, lying on the dirt next to the grave mounds she’d dug. The sky had lightened by that point in time—had she really slept the whole night through with no recollection of having done so?—and in the dawning light, there was no ignoring the destruction that still lay waste around her.

In the aftermath of her breakdown, there was a detached sense of resignation that wasn’t present before. Inhaling sharply, the acrid scent of smoke singed her nostrils as she’d made herself to enter the ruins of her dwelling, scraping together whatever scant provisions she needed before washing in the river.

Home was no more.

She threw the makeshift brush of a stick away and got to her feet, dusting the ash away from her knees and shins, and walked east.

oOo

She entered the gates of Luoyang nearly a week later.

The city was boisterous, the contained economy of commodities thriving among sellers and buyers. Oblivious to what lay beyond the four walls of the protected city, their existence revolved around the generation of income and the in- and out-flow of scholars and soldiers that daily shifted the city’s dynamics. If the return of the Huns merely struck dull fear in the imperial army’s veterans, there was only ill-concealed excitement in the youngest of recruits. The troops temporarily stationed there had added some bulk and life to the native population, as the soldiers enjoyed the special favours and offers that the shopkeepers tended to throw their way.

If she could, she would shout and rave against the horrors of war and violence, shaking into them the blood-curdling terror of running from an enemy and the earth-shattering pain of loss. Her voice would go unheeded, the generic government response merely justifying the conscription of soldiers that happened on a daily basis.

Yet here she was, falling back on the only other known entity in her life. If conscripting meant helping the imperial army to close their porous borders and help defeat the Huns, so be it, even if it meant being in a man’s clothing and slipping back into the role play of a different gender.

Mulan waded her way through the crowd, looking out for a desk and a queue.

It did not take very long to discover where the crowds were.

In a particular corner sandwiched between a government office and the official’s home, the queue was rapidly dwindling under a threatening grey sky.

The unpleasant surprise perhaps, was to again see that same skinny man who craved her downfall with his slender, pointy brush and his ever-ready scroll in hand, sitting at that desk with a flinty look on his face and calling for the latest round of recruits.

Chi Fu.

She wondered if he remembered her as she joined the queue and peered at the long scroll of names that he was filling.

“Next!”

Stepping forward to the desk with that still-uncomfortable manly gait and an artificially deepened voice, she bit out her name.

_Fa Ping._

The flower vase—the name that had garnered so much disdain from the start. She would use that name with honour this time.

But Chi Fu didn’t even look up as he messily swirled her name across the scroll and gestured vaguely to the right with a small slip of paper. Then she was rudely shoved away by his assistant as he attended to the next in line, a slight, lanky boy who was probably no older than her when she took her father's place.

The name, boldly and carelessly scrawled on the conscription slip said _Fa Ping_ , not _Fa Zhou_ as it had last time. She had played that hazardous name game years ago, with a false bravado in the face of her commanding officer. But Mulan, or Ping…or whatever they would call her—what did it matter now that there were no matchmakers and family to please or prospective husbands to meet?

Tomorrow, she would meet her new commanding officer along with the other fresh-faced boys. Perhaps he would be a captain who would be in likeness of the Captain Shang she remembered.

There was a comfort and almost wilful glee in knowing that she already possessed the skills that they painstakingly needed to be taught. Surely her slight frame would now arouse no suspicion and be of no consequence when she proved herself able to hoist buckets of water up mountain trails or perform harsh drill routines and callisthenics in the days to come.

From where she stood, Mulan watched as Chi Fu finally roll up his scroll and stalk away for the night, his assistant hurrying to pick up the table and the chair after him.

Many boys had signed up, she thought in dismay—boys who thought that war made them men, initiating them into a rougher world.

She saw many of them walk in the direction of inns and brothels, foolishly spending their last night in drunken revelry and callous merry-making, absorbing momentary pleasures from wine, women and song.

Perhaps it did. But one could not envision the change nor feel it until they marched into war and returned completely changed.

_If_ they returned.


	4. The Move and the Meeting

Mulan froze, listening to the fading cry of a bird as it fled into the dusk, rejoicing in the glorious early spring evening.

And suddenly with running footsteps, and a calculated sixteen paces, and then a shout of triumph…the flash of a blade and the rush of air caused by a quick spin.

They eyed each other briefly and disappeared into a whirl of martial movements that ended as soon as it started when the superior of the two emerged.

Xing Tai cried out in horror, unable to stop the clumsy blade from its downward swing that guaranteed a flesh wound.

"Ping!"

His yell was a timely warning, but Mulan had seen his parries and thrusts, already rolling onto her side before the tip of his sword pierced the earth.

"I win."

The air that she smelt seemed to be thinly fire-breathed and suddenly flower-perfumed as she thudded onto the ground and sprawled flat on her back, now facing that same sharp tip that he had immediately yanked back up from the ground.

It was indeed a fight well lost, and it earned a chuckle from her.

A simple, childlike elucidation from the one who had toppled her balance and brought her down in the dust. Xing Tai only gasped slightly for breath now.

Mulan approved heartily seeing as he was the youngest of them all, a lot greener than her, but he had improved vastly in the past few weeks, growing out of the thin frame that she herself once had.

She roughly grabbed the hand that he cordially extended to her. Still shaky with the surge of adrenaline, she pulled herself up and dusting the remnants of the rich soil that had stained her dark pants brown.

"Of course," she told him mildly, still smiling at the gleam of pride that shone in his stance. "You will best me anytime now. It is well-earned."

Xing Tai lightly clapped her shoulder in camaraderie, not noticing the slight stiffening of her form at that contact; she was still unused to the free touches and claps that the men seemed to bestow on each other unthinkingly.

Five years and that lesson had still not been thoroughly mastered.

"You are too generous with your praise, Ping," Xing Tai admitted hesitantly. "I owe my skills of the sword and hand combat styles to you. Any other officer wouldn't have been so quick to congratulate me."

She tried to appear nonchalant, waving off his acclaim dismissively. Praises and compliments failed to coax the reddish hue from her cheeks as it had in the past, that lifetime ago when she had stood in front of the matchmaker blushing with shame, a violet red.

But Xing Tai was a bit of a treasure in the mud who ran the extra mile, who climbed the trees faster and shot more arrows because he genuinely wanted to be better…and did it all with unfailing optimism and an attitude that just couldn't be beaten down by a surly commanding officer.

Besides, Mulan genuinely liked him. She could only hope that the years wouldn't erode that sunny disposition and reshape it into a jaded, cynical ones that she'd seen in so many officers who strutted around the camp.

"Why would I withhold praise when it has been rightfully earned? Besides, I daresay you'll need all that I have showed you and more."

Together they walked to the shed to return their weapons, drinking from their canteens of water, trying futilely to slake the thirst of a parched throat.

It was time for the evening meal, Mulan observed, the other soldiers raucous in their laughter and speech, as they collected their soups that helped drive the lingering traces of winter from their bodies.

The soldier's training basics—beginning with callisthenics and ending with hard runs up the steep mountain face—had brought on laboured grunts, prolonged groans, needless railing and endless complaints. But a reluctant camaraderie and grudging friendships had blossomed among unlikely allies. It was again nostalgically pleasing to witness bonds that Mulan herself had briefly experienced with Yao, Chien Po, Ling—the familiarity was as painful as the searing tug she felt in her chest.

They carried buckets of water around the winding mountain route once more, twirled wooden poles in front of wide-eyed recruits and rode their horses to pit themselves against each other in mock-battles as the early snow fell.

Theoretically, she and Xing Tai were of the same rank—newly appointed and mostly anonymous junior officers, but in the weeks of training she had gained prominence with the unmistakably conditioned state of her muscles and the ease with which she ran through each strengthening exercise.

It was a secret, inward laugh that Mulan enjoyed at their expense sometimes, to see the struggles of the new soldiers through sympathetic eyes.

oOo

"In formation!"

The soldiers fall into neat lines, the command as familiar now to them as their own names.

They were finally 'battle-ready', as Chi Fu had decided, after these few, short weeks of rigorous training.

The order given for them to move out in the next few days had lent the camp a tangible air of excitement and anticipation. Many recruits wore their calluses and wounds proudly even before riding into the path of destruction, the premature badge of honour.

The news had come a few days ago by a flustered courier riding south, carrying a secret missive from the Grand Marshal who had commanded that troops must once again strengthen the border and the northern wastelands. And they were to meet the Marshal several _li_ west of the Tung Shao Pass before continuing onwards, an unexpected move that had cut their intensive training from its full, original length of a half-year to a few weeks.

The recruits fidgeted and bickered while they received their individual orders, only to have their Captain rein them in with a warning glint in his eye. As soon as he turned away, their bickering resumed, more boisterously than ever.

The whole cycle repeated itself a few more times until the Captain finally lost his patience, yelled and marched the lot of them off.

Audacious, Mulan thought with an inward grin.

She realised that such memories kept her warm…the familiar slangs, the shoving, the ribbing…the resemblance that it all bore to the first time she joined. The displeased look on Captain Zhi Hui's face would have been comical, had he not already known that every minute spent with a fellow-soldier was precious.

Zhi Hui was one plucked out of the elite ranks of scholarly learning (similar to Captain Shang, as far as she recalled)—a path afforded only to the wealthy homes. Of his military prowess and leadership however, she knew nothing. Like other captains and ranking offers, what had made him take this path into the military instead of the wealth and fame guaranteed to those who flocked to the imperial examinations?

Beyond the soldiers' bickering and discontent however, division among the ranks was endemic, Mulan had learned. Unsurprising, considering the men jostling for power and control on every level while trying to evade the responsibilities of leadership and accountability.

The army had always needed a mix of the strategist experts and the men more inclined to action, where both needed to head out into the field even as Yang Di closely kept a handful of diviners and sorcerers by his side. And that it was on a contradictory mix of advice that Yang Di's orders came, only less and less consistently so by the day.

oOo

Nightfall finally purged the dissenting voices and Mulan fell into fretful sleep, dreaming of another realm where heightened tension and the background hum of growing paranoia mingled.

The horses had been readied days before—white, stately horses that only officers of ranks sat upon as they prepared for the move towards Tung Shao in the freeze of the morning.

The rest marched on, following the standard bearers.

Progress was steady; the weather was gracious to permit the days to bleed into each other with light breezes and warm sunshine save for the occasional ghoulish lash of rain that brought slight frost.

Mulan sighed constantly as they passed the inundated rice fields framed by the steep mountains, ignoring the winks of the men and the blushes of the field workers. The tableaux they presented was picturesque and bold; they passed the field humming the same song that some soldiers belted heartily those years ago.

It made her remember her family, and what she'd left behind.

Now they sang again, of _a girl worth fighting for_.

The pretty picture vanished as they passed into the stark wasteland that hid behind the jagged peaks, beyond the winding, treacherous route.

The glorious spread of white flags with the red coat of arms floated and waved in the cold breeze came into view—a sign that they had reached the battlefront, the unalterable entry into inevitable bloodshed.

They set up camp in the field by dusk, the elevation high enough that grey clouds puffed from her mouth. Luckily enough, she had her own tent once again, pitched at a discreet distance and near a tributary for some privacy, but not so far that it would cast any suspicious eyes on her.

After the evening meal, boredom and curiosity drove Mulan out of her own tent to seek out the largest tent that sat in the middle of the neat rows of white, tiptoeing around agitated voices lest her footsteps were heard.

Palpitations cracking her chest, she crept closer to listen in.

"—orders cannot be disobeyed!"

"—only to fortify the borders!"

"Do you dare disobey the emperor's orders—"

"Open your eyes! Out here everything as different as night and day!"

It could only be Chi Fu who obstinately pitted himself against the captains, generals and marshals. The mouthpiece of the capital, as he liked to refer to himself.

But the other voice that pushed back as hard…recognition raised the hair on her neck.

Though Mulan was careful not to cast an unwelcome shadow upon the pristine white material, the tent opening flipped unexpectedly open with a dizzying speed that made her reel forward. Out stalked a tall figure who still wore full armour, his face etched with lines as he scowled out at some point in the distance.

_Grand Marshal Li Shang._

That face and the source of the onslaught of her fragmented memories.

She jolted and lurched away, then bit hard into her cheek in some effort to regain some control over her scattered nerves.

_Move!_

Ignoring the coppery tinge of blood in her mouth, Mulan slowed down deliberately, putting a careful footstep over the next.

One foot in front of the other, slow and steady.

Time slowed to an infinitesimal pace.

In the fuzzy dimness of the distant firelight that burned a distance away from the tent, several nocturnal creatures darted in and out of sight, their skittering sounds amplified in the stillness.

With the intention of disappearing into the looming shadows past the large tent, she crept towards its side furthest away from where the Marshal stood, the sustained but snail-like crouch-walk causing her muscles—already fatigued from training—to tremble with each step.

Her traitorous legs folded in on her.

She dropped straight on her back and into the dirt, managing to stifle the grunt of pain but not the tell-tale crack of a traitorous twig beneath her.

The Marshal's head snapped up.

He whirled sharply, dropped into a crouch and dove sideways in a single move. His arm snaked out to grab her collar and then he was roughly dragging her into the firelight before yanking her upright till her toes barely touched the ground.

There was barely any time to react, let alone speak.

For a fleeting moment, she'd been on the hard ground; in the next, a hard pull on tunic had brought her face to face with the Marshal for the first time in five years.

In all the scenarios that she could have possibly imagined, meeting Captain Li Shang—no, the _Grand_ _Marshal Li Shang_ —again in the wake of her nosy eavesdropping had never been one of those.

Not even in her dreams had she conceived of such a scene. There had even been mere flights of fancy that she'd thought to shut down early in the early months of her homecoming, where stupid dreams of him—and _her_ —had inserted themselves involuntarily—

_Stop._

"Soldier! What were you trying—"

Shock slackened his fingers as recognition finally sank in, his loosened grip leaving her no time to regain her balance.

Once again she thudded onto her back, the dull, fleeting pain of the impact now accompanied by an expletive and a raspy exclamation of her name.

" _Ping_?"


	5. The Reunion

_"If one cannot adjust oneself to the human world and heaven, how can he accomplish his achievement on the basis of transformation?"_  
\- From the Decree of Sui Yang Di, on the building of the 2nd capital of Luoyang, December 17th, 604 A.D

oOo

Sitting on her ass, with her hands splayed out ungainly and gaping at the commander who’d put her in that position could not have possibly presented a worse picture of a dignified and composed junior officer—who’d been caught eavesdropping no less.

With the initial shock wearing off, Mulan fumbled to stand at attention, head slightly bowed in deference.

And now as she faced him, it seemed as though her tongue had gotten stuck to her cheek.

“Uh, Grand Marshal Li.”

But apparently, she need not have worried about the picture she presented.

“Ping? Is that you?”

The Marshal was staring at her incredulously, the slackness in his mouth and his wide eyes betraying his own shock and surprise.

She imagined she looked no different.

He was as she remembered—leanly muscled and tall—but changed. He _was_ a changed man—no one stayed the same when war surrounded them constantly. But there was the same sharp jaw and hollowed out cheeks, several more prominent lines around his tired eyes, and the same broad shoulders that seemed a little stooped.

And still impressively magnetic.

She wondered if the gruff, yet compassionate captain that she had known briefly so long ago still existed, buried under this even sterner mien of a soldier who now bore unimaginable responsibilities.

It was the Marshal who recovered first. With an awkwardness that was palpable, he put a heavy hand on her shoulder, then curled her in slightly for a manly hug, causing her to tense slightly from his seeping heat.

Her apprehension at the brief contact went unnoticed. Yet instead of pushing him away, she stood unmoving, still feeling the ghostly warmth on her neck and shoulder where his arm had been.

“It is good to see you well, Ping.”

How had he managed that so easily? How did he act like the bottom hadn’t fallen out of his world as hers just had?

It was a struggle just to move her mouth.

“Likewise, Marshal Li. My belated congratulations on your promotion.”

“My…promotion?” His frown deepened into a scowl as he shot her a bewildered look. “Ping, why the formality? In fact, I’m eager to—where have you been? How did you—?”

She spoke just as he shook and cleared his throat, looking as though he was gathering himself.

“Sir—I am—”

“—this is a surprise.”

It dawned on her that he seemed as flustered as she was. He was stumbling over his words just as she was, the disbelief and delight in his eyes mirroring hers.

Slowly, a slight grin tugged a corner of her mouth upwards.

“It is indeed a surprise, Sir.”

Seeing the slow twitch in his cheek, the brightness in his eyes—the awkwardness between them would probably creep in as soon as they had their preliminaries out of the way.

“How have you been, Ping?”

The deceptively simple question paralysed her.

Where to begin?

Bridging time and space in a few minutes was an impossibility. To put into words all that had transpired in those years—or even _weeks_ —was a monumental challenge, more so when she’d finally accepted that everything with her old army comrades and her Captain lay firmly in the past.

A fact even harder to accept was that her own family now lay in the past.

Seeing Li Shang standing in front of her in the flesh was akin to taking the lid off the wartime cacophony in her head—dormant for so long, now threatening to simmer.

Would a bland, generic response satisfy him?

Mulan settled for a slight shrug. “I have been well.”

“I’m sure there is more to the story than just that.” He pointed at her and raised a hand when she sought to clarify her statement. “I never thought I would see you again. When there is time, we should speak together.”

Speak? She would honestly prefer leaving it all in the past if she could.

Thankfully, he did not see the grimace that crossed her face.

“I received reports before the troops arrived. Zhi Hui gave a special mention about your performance in the training camp. About a junior officer who walked among the recruits, spoke with them and paid attention to those who struggled.”

Was that fond pride she heard in his voice?

“At that time, I hadn’t known that you were one and the same person he was referring to.”

It was instinct by now, to wave the praise away. “I wonder if he exaggerates.”

“Unlikely. Captain Zhi Hui is not one for wild talk.”

“I…hadn’t known. But thank you, Marshal.”

There was nothing more to say unless it involved a long night of explanations that would lead to more unpleasant revelations. Her own reticence, a product of the desperate need for self-preservation and a quality that was once said to be scarce in a girl like her, now ironically muted her.

Before he could continue, the footsteps of a messenger thundered up to where they stood, calling the Marshal’s attention to yet another pressing matter.

He conferred in low tones with the messenger, irritation tightening his brow the longer the conversation wore on. Finally, the messenger turned and left, but the Marshal was already looking into the distance, his jaw tight, his attention already diverted from their conversation.

He turned to her a second later, annoyance sparking in his dark eyes. “I am called to other matters, Ping.”

“Could I be of any help?” Her offer was tentative and fully expected to be rejected.

His lips softened into a rueful smile. “I’m afraid not. But I will meet the troops tomorrow at sunrise.”

With an apologetic nod, he departed in the direction of the war tent.

Only then did she sag in relief as her legs walked her in another direction, towards the yet-to-be-discovered solitary hot spring that sparkled against the marshes.

Marvelling in its crystalline clarity, Mulan cast a quick glance around before pulling off her clothes and slipping into its comforting warmth.

Lost in the swirl of its gentle currents and the small luxuries found in the unlikeliest of places, she allowed herself to drift to the main subject of her thoughts and to regain the same ground that had disappeared beneath her feet.

_Grand Marshal Li Shang…_ what were the odds?

Now he was a high-ranking soldier who still led the battle from its front-lines, despite the fatigue and battle-weariness that she’d glimpsed in his face. His strict adherence to duty, his unwavering ability to stay the course and last through the years of war, petty skirmishes and uprisings…it made an undeniably striking picture.

She’d never stopped believing that he was destined for greatness, even though that might have been said out of a mild infatuation and fanciful yearnings that she had been quick to tamp down.

That he’d still seemed eager to talk with a junior officer like her—with the rank disparity laying between them even greater than ever—was astounding.

_From now on, you have my trust._

Those words floated back, unbidden. When the then-Captain Shang had said those words to her, it had made her feel like a fraud, even though she’d been quick to rationalise that loyalty, courage and bravery were qualities found equally in both genders.

But would he have said the same words so openly to a woman? Would he have thought the same of her had he—

She tried to shake those stray thoughts off as conjecture. They were no better than wishful thinking.

Today, his reappearance brought her deception back into the light. And he ever found out…there was no doubt that he would be severe in doling out punishment as he saw fit.

Mulan took a shuddering breath and held it, absently wondering if the heavens would strike her for carrying on this pretence a second time.


	6. Her Reluctant Agreement

Shang had barely settled on his cot for what felt like minutes after a tiresome, teeth-gritting argument with Chi-Fu and his aide when a shout got him out of bed.

Moving the tent flap aside and seeing the eastern corner of the camp belching black smoke high into the air ramped his adrenaline levels right back up. A scout from the Hun camp it seemed, had sneaked in, set their fuel stores alight, and left the charred bodies of a handful of recruits on night watch burnt to bone at the camp’s edge.

It was a flashy, dangerous show of their brutal power and cunning, because they could.

Shang could see only one possible outcome. When word reached the capital of this attack, the incident would be instantly proclaimed a brazen challenge, acting as catalyst and justification for accelerating their campaign against the tribes, which meant that the frenzied pace of conscription and training…continued.

A flock of birds took off overhead, the beat of their wings loud amidst the chaos of the morning. Carrier pigeons would soon bring their messages to the capital, and to the other troops stationed hundreds of _li_ away.

No rest for the war-weary.

But the cycles of constant attacks and counter strikes that had lasted generations could not continue indefinitely even if these lately seemed like they were much more about saving face than about true strategic expansion. Heavy losses in the past few campaigns on various fronts and other border frontiers meant deployment schedules were irregular and dependent on urgent need, not to mention the heavy human investment and time required to get the recruits into decent fighting shape.

The telling lack of foresight or the lack of communication in this matter annoyed him.

The repetitive but grating arguments about this very issue with Chi Fu that took place nearly daily always ended in the same emphatic fashion: that he was to scout, map, defend and hold the line, quell the uprisings, settle down.

When they’d conferred him the rank of Grand Marshal, he hadn’t anticipated that a fair bit of the work had to do with acceptance. Many things simply lay beyond his control and the influence of his rank.

Any further thought about his accidental meeting with Ping late last night had been relegated to the back of his mind. He had been ruminating on the depth of his own surprise and happiness at the sight of a familiar face—enough to momentarily dampen the dourness of the ongoing campaign against the northern invaders—up until the frenzied shouts from the tents lining edge of their temporary dwellings shook him out of his short-lived reverie.

But the efficiency of the troops meant that the clean-up took less than the whole morning, leaving the rest of the day for him to follow the planned training schedule.

Striding up to where the soldiers were grunting during their late morning drills, Shang watched their unpolished but enthusiastic charges at one another as the splintered, painful memory of the Tung Shao battle played itself out vividly at the back of his head.

He hadn’t thought of that in years, but Ping’s presence had undoubtedly brought it back.

By the time the sun was high in the sky, he was prowling past the lines of panting soldiers, until his eye was inevitably drawn to a solitary figure who stood slightly apart from the rest, smaller in stature, yet executing the drills perfectly and with perfect form.

Ping was still that slight boy he used to be, but with some added bulk in his arms and legs. Perhaps he was sturdier, a little heavier, and wore confidence and his archery kit like a second skin that made him look invincible.

In fact, his moves during a sparring exchange with another recruit were sure-footed and almost calculated. Yet certain elements of his defence and attacks had contained hints of foreign martial arts mastery with almost unnatural bends, positions, postures and angles that strayed far from the traditional Qin stances of warfare.

Watching him was a thing of beauty.

Everything about Ping was…outwardly perfect. And frustratingly too put-together to decipher.

When it came to speech, he spoke little or only as much as he needed to, and for this reason, remained slippery and elusive as he was when he’d first entered as a skinny recruit.

Having first dismissed Ping as a failure who would be sent home early in disgrace was a misjudgement of his that Shang could now readily admit. More so, when Ping had, at some point in time, become a bundle of contradictions he itched to unravel the moment he joined the ranks in battle.

No one knew that much more about Ping apart from the basic knowledge he’d provided in their records: a son of a farmer in a small farming community who became an exemplary officer and a brilliant archer. And he would have faded back into obscurity until the final battle with Shan-Yu changed the game.

But Ping _did_ vanish.

He’d simply disappeared into thin air and Shang would have doubted the validity of the boy’s existence if not for the very-present scars that he’d sustained in that very same battle…if not for Ping’s dark eyes and the secrets held in them…that he thought about too frequently over the years after Ping’s abrupt departure.

A few searches and discreet questions posed to a few important people about the northern provinces that had to send their sons into battle had led nowhere.

Now that Ping had returned, this soldier—not just the boy with bright eyes, a delicate face and a slender frame and a will of steel beneath that Shang had come to admire—was a puzzle he convinced himself he wanted to solve.

oOo

Their break in the morning had finally opened an opportunity for conversation and his summons for Ping into his tent had been quick and immediate.

Ping’s entry was tentative, his feet staying put at the tent’s edge as though he was looking to take flight any time.

“Marshal Li.”

An unexpected tinge of annoyance hit Shang deep—hadn’t Ping known that he’d already earned his spurs as a credible officer? Impatiently, he stood and waved him further in.

“Come on.”

His order was brief and curt as he pointed at a large map of the northern regions of the Kingdom that lined the table.

"I want you to have a look at this.”

A spark of interest lit Ping’s eyes. He moved towards the table, eagerly scanning the terrain and the well-worn markings of its topographical features.

“Sir?”

“Tell me what think you’re seeing.”

There was a brief pause as Ping took in the details.

“The map shows areas susceptible to attacks and the paths that the Huns have taken in the past. Here,” Ping circled the markers marking the peaks of some hills, “those marked in red show the high-risk areas. The Tung Shao pass is a critical passageway because of the glacier that feeds into the rivers heading south.”

Shang nodded approvingly, liking sound of interest and intelligence in Ping’s response. His assessment was spot-on, but then again, this particular soldier had never failed to surprise him.

“The current Hun strategy is not the large-scale invasion but petty skirmishes,” he reaffirmed. “Lighting-quick attacks and equally fast retreats, with small, fast-moving units of men to destabilise large imperial military camps. They strike hard and inflict more damage than we like.”

“To what end?”

“To erode the military resources of the House of Sui, to keep this border porous. More ominously, as a distraction for a large-scale attack. We can only guess.”

A look that Shang couldn’t properly interpret flitted past Ping’s face, replaced near-immediately by a carefully-constructed blankness that he also didn’t understand. Instead, Ping traced his finger across the blue lines and the red crosses marked on the map.

“So you intend to push them further back by depriving them of the river.”

“For now,” Shang acknowledged. “The soldiers here will move to redirect certain tributaries south of Tung Shao for the next few days at least, dumping into rivers loads of sands, burying the water sources that are sustaining Hun tribes that lurk at the nearby borders.”

Ping nodded slowly in understanding. “That sounds like a risky undertaking. But will it be enough?”

“That’s a difficult question to answer. This is merely a temporary measure. It is only a matter of time before the nomadic tribes gain the numbers they need to completely overwhelm the imperial border camps.”

Ping had drawn closer as he spoke, their sides nearly touching, the muted daylight in the tent casting mesmerising shadows on his delicate features. Suddenly eager for another point of focus, Shang averted his eyes, the sudden tightness in his chest easing slightly.

“I might have made some changes to the camp formation and attack plans. We need to keep our focus on shoring up the defence lines and using the terrain to our advantage.”

Did that sound like a renegade of a Marshal who was eager to go his own way instead of adhering to the trusted methods of old?

Ping’s voice was carefully neutral. “Learning to adapt is a vital skill.”

“You don’t agree?” He asked and saw Ping blanch in turn.

“No! I mean, yes, Sir. I think what you are trying to do is…is not quite what I expected.”

In response, he drew out a narrow brush, dragged out blank piece of paper and started sketching. Out came an increasingly complicated picture of terrain that was inaccessible or inhospitable, and the number of contingents that were sent to landfills, and mountainous regions that concealed passes and ambush opportunities.

He knew it so well by now that transferring intangible knowledge to concrete detail on paper was a seamless task.

“This is incredibly detailed.” Ping had drawn closer as he sketched, his low murmur now washing over him like the scrape of silk over skin as Shang put down the lines denoting the confluence of the streams. “Not to mention, brilliant and indispensable for our purposes.”

He took a deep breath to re-centre himself. “Over the last year, I conducted my own survey of the region and filled in some details that the official map did not include. The nomadic tribes know the terrain intimately. We should as well.”

Bright eyes, shining with admiration for his work, turned on him. “Know your enemy.”

He gave Ping a grim look. “A lot has changed and there is still much to do. Beyond what we see on the map, the cartographers have not re-mapped the ancient Qin bulwark border fortifications in centuries.”

Ping’s attention darted from the map, to the ground and finally back to him, conflict now written on his face.

“If this is not too bold of me to ask, Marshal,” Ping ventured out slowly, as though he was trying to find the right words to say. “Why did you summon me here? Why are you telling me such details that are certainly not privy to the recruits?”

All of which were questions _not_ pertaining to strategy and war that he was valiantly trying to answer as well. If not for Ping, at least for himself, for some accountability’s sake.

How could he explain the excitement he felt when he’d finally stumbled into the only other soldier he thought had become a…friend? Had he not given a thought beyond simply wanting to speak to a soldier with whom he’d shared an intense campaign with years ago because it was a familiar face? Had this conversation suddenly spiralled out of his original intention of recapturing that camaraderie and admiration he’d felt for Ping into one that he was barely in control of? That he was, at this present moment, trying hard to ignore that odd, lingering tightness that gripped him with Ping so close to his side?

“—knowing I’m not the most experienced or the strongest, and I am just one of the many here,” Ping continued obliviously, as though determined to lay out his own inadequacies. “I think what I’m saying, Marshal, that perhaps—”

Shang stopped him mid-sentence with a raised hand.

“Have a bit more confidence in yourself. You always give your all. You never give up. All the qualities that I can attest to. Most of all, you have my trust.”

Words he reiterated now because he still believed them, even if they caused Ping’s pale cheeks to stain a deep pink.

Against his better judgement, he stared at the contrast of the rosy blush and its gradual fade into the porcelain whiteness of the boy’s skin, longer than he should have.

“I still don’t understand—”

“I have an assignment for you. But this is a choice for you to make, not an order. I meant what I said then, and I mean it now. In fact, I have every confidence that you will measure up to it.”

Impulse was driving him onward, instinct telling him that this was a decision he had to make now. The plan coalesced as he spoke, even if some part of him was insisting he was speaking like a feckless idiot rather than a commanding officer with a strategically-planned mission in mind.

He was holding up Ping’s bravery, his loyalty and his personal sense of honour to his face, about to use the very values Ping upheld for his own purposes. And he could not exactly bring himself yet to fully examine the reasons behind this plea, apart from the creeping knowledge that it had to do with more than Ping’s fine soldierly qualities and the fact that they had served together before.

Valid as that justification was, there were other more experienced men with those same qualifications. He would have been able to keep his distance as the commander and more importantly, keep that boundary between ranks water-tight. With Ping, there was already every indication that he wouldn’t— _couldn’t_.

Still, Shang forged ahead.

“We will scout as a team of two. Ride north-west, past the river and uphill into higher elevation, going past the boundary of the map, getting lay of the land.” He gestured to a point beyond where they were on paper, circling around to another imaginary location. “We strike pre-emptively if needed. It might take days, or even weeks. And then we will know where exactly who and where our enemy is and where we have fallen short.”

Ping looked troubled and adrift. “Is it just the both of us?”

“For this mission, yes. I have already sent a few other scouts in teams of two to the eastern fringes. They will report to Chi Fu when they return.”

“You left the most dangerous mission for yourself.”

“I cannot ask them to sacrifice what I would not myself.”

The most recent spate of uprisings and attacks have come from this particular front. Shang could not send others to take the hardest and the most dangerous of missions without leading by example.

“There is also another reason for that,” he continued. “There have been sightings that suggest Shan-Yu still lives.”

Shock blanched Ping’s face white; obviously he could not have known that his reckless and foolish act of bravery in the Tung Shao Pass had not buried _all_ of the enemy alive.

“The nomadic tribes are breaking through the fortified lines. Their raid patterns are unpredictable. They strike, fearsome and fast, pushing our defences back little by little each time. There are whispers and unconfirmed messages sent by our couriers that Shan-Yu and his advisors are behind these invasions. There is much at stake and the journey is difficult,” he warned. “The way north from here is treacherous, hindered by the—”

“I will go, Marshal.”

Ping’s immediate acquiescence was surprising but not unexpected.

Bravery, in all its forms indeed. Dark satisfaction curled low in his stomach.

What he had left out was that the authority in camp had been transferred to Zhi Hui and Wang Xun—both men whom he trusted—to move the troops as needed. Leaving the both of them anchorless and disconnected.

“Good. Tomorrow, we ride into unknown and dangerous regions. Just remember, Ping, there is every chance that we may not return.” 


	7. The Wonder

The faint glimmer of fading sunlight and the early spring wind had cooled the air considerably, and Mulan watched the dancing swirls of her exhalation disappear into the breeze as they slowly climbed uphill.

The Marshal showed no sign of slowing despite impending nightfall but he’d already warned her that distance needed to be gained as much as the last rays of daylight allowed them. He finally came to a stop at the next ridge, eyeing the vista of jagged hilltops partially obscured by a descending fog.

They stood in silence for minutes, Mulan taking in the beauty of the land splayed out in dusky purple-orange hues. From what she remembered of the map, those distant, jagged peaks were the borderlands that they would ride for, if it all went well.

Despite the lateness of the day, the Marshal was still alert, his critical gaze bouncing over the landscape revealing his preoccupation with its topographical features rather than the breathtaking sunset.

“Don’t you wonder if Yang Di had committed a grave error when he chose to drive the Huns from the northern regions?” Shang casually asked as he pulled out a blank sheet, marked a few things along the line of their journey and packed it back in the satchel.

“What do you mean?”

“It is a well-known fact that the emperor before Yang Di had was of mixed northern blood descent.”

“He used his family ties to gain some form of unity.”

Mulan shrugged. “There’s nothing unusual in it, honestly.”

It was an arrangement common enough that it didn’t shock her at all. From the poor to the wealthy, such unions—especially inter-tribal or inter-regional ones between high-ranking officials and wealthy families with influence—were transactional in nature, had very little to do with personal choice and more to do with capital gain and financial security. In fact, _she_ had nearly been part of an arranged marriage when fate had turned her life in a different direction.

Why would this be any different with the royal family who’d primarily used unions and offspring and dowries as bargaining chips?

“In some cases, the stakes are way higher. You simply have more to lose or gain when the marriage crosses borders and involves tainting pure bloodlines. The Sui Dynasty was built on the support of the northern tribes, in that year the south was unified. Some tribes were of Hunnic descent. Did you know that?”

“There were stories that Wen Di secured their loyalty, somehow. I assumed that it was unfounded myth. To be fair to us, this wasn’t knowledge that we farmers had first-hand,” she finished wryly.

This came as no surprise. As always, the palace guarded its secrets closely and disseminated what they thought best suited the ranks in society.

“No, I gather not,” Shang looked at her speculatively. “But neither is it a secret. This shaky alliance was forged on familial grounds. Wen Di had distant but powerful cousins who believed in the bond of blood. So he ascended the throne with the approval of the northern nomads, in return for their peace and some cessation of territory to the Huns. And in doing so, he left the borders porous.”

“And blood ties, with each passing generation, only takes you so far.”

She understood it better now as some pieces fell into place. Alliances based on ancestral ties that frayed because of the lapse of time lasted only as long as the next generation’s political ambitions.

The spillover effects of a crumbling alliance were immense. The Huns’ aggressive southward trek from a region little explored strained the resources of the fortified cities that had traditionally been bastions of China’s military might in the north and north-western front. And the first few provinces in their line of fire had simply included hers.

“But not all the tribes agree. There is some clear dissent among them,” Shang continued, “even if we tend to think of them as a loose unit. There are those who choose aggression and their own expansion over peace. Like Yang Di, they also believe that these ties have failed.”

“And now Yang Di disavows them. The fragile peace that his father brokered has deteriorated to the point where he sees no benefit maintaining it.”

“Had not Yang Di ascended the throne under suspicious circumstances?” Pure speculation, but she had to ask.

His gaze locked onto hers. “Yang Di was forced to be a dutiful son, conforming to his father's standards until he came of age. After his father's death, he started to act in defiance of his father's legacy, pursuing projects and expansions that Wen Di would not have approved of, to the extent of taking his father's concubine for his own.”

A frown creased her brows. “That was not my question.”

He gave her an amused smile. “I was fully aware of how I answered. That is all you will hear from me concerning this subject.”

To speak openly against the throne was at worst, punishable by death but that he tried to stay the moderate path even when they were they were the only two people around spoke of his integrity.

Nonetheless, the salacious details the Marshal was providing had never really reached the ears of the common folk and to hear them now so cavalierly spoken was in some way, as comfortingly spicy as the gossip and food that were always passed around the family table.

“And to think that we are supposed to hold the rulers in the highest esteem. Like the holy descendants of the gods who first shaped the Middle Kingdom.”

He threw her a smirk in return. “That is how they want their story to be told. If you believe such tales, then you are probably more foolish than I thought.”

“I believed those stories, as a child.” Such were the tall tales told to a child as far as fodder for bedtime stories went. It was the kind of talk that thrived on the unbelievable, then arrowed straight into the land of gods and myths, each tale taller than the next in order to satiate a sleepy child’s cravings.

The Marshal barked a short laugh, the skin around his eyes crinkling in his amusement. It also made her heart race a little faster.

“Ancestors, give us strength,” he implored mockingly, turning his eyes skyward.

“As a child,” Mulan emphasised firmly, now smiling too. “Then I grew up and starting asking questions which my parents couldn’t answer.”

The twinge in her chest flared at the mention of her parents, blooming to a physical ache as she thought of the round, kindly face of her grandmother and the smiles she’d reserved for her grandchildren.

“I can’t imagine that.” His tone, soft and sombre, sent a shiver through her. “I have trouble thinking of you as a precocious and noisy boy causing your parents too much grief.”

A precocious and noisy _boy_ —a jarring and timely reminder that he did not see her as who she really was.

Desperate for a change of topic, Mulan fumbled for the first question that came to mind. “Do you ever hope to see peace in your lifetime?”

It was something she regretted as soon as it slipped out of her mouth. The impulsive question was too personal, too naïve, too wistful and too…soft for a hardened, cynical soldier to address without throwing some mockery her way in return.

But Shang bowed forward slightly as he considered her question, his shoulders stooping as though they bore the weight of the world. When his eyes lifted to meet hers, they were almost pleading…yearning…wanting.

“We have had periods of peace, some longer than the others.” He allowed his head to fall back as he looked up at the canopy of stars that had begun to twinkle against the darkening sky. “It is all I have known. And I don’t know how likely it is that we will ever experience a long, continuous stretch of it for as long as we live. What we have now is the calm before the storm, a false peace held together by a thread, and it unravels with a wrong word or a wrong move.”

Mulan thought of the gossamer thin threads of the elegant gown she had to wear as she recited the final admonition—it now felt like that had happened in another lifetime, to a person she didn’t recognise anymore—and that the gentlest of pulls would split them apart.

oOo

The days bled slowly into each other, the routine between them more comforting than chore. They pushed on as far as they could without tiring the horses, spent hours debating the topography and potential ambush sites, then rode in search for a place to set up camp, then spent even more hours hunched over food and strategic-talk.

If she could pretend that the days were energetic sojourns that cloaked the lurking danger of the mission they were on, the nights were becoming agony of a different sort.

The worn paths had grown narrower as the elevation rose, and the suitable places they could find to camp for the night had rapidly dwindled. Their tents were pitched incrementally closer and closer together, the lack of privacy becoming uncomfortably imminent.

The exhaustion of maintaining the persona of Ping was leaving her worn and anxious. But regret on having agreed to this mission despite her trepidation was never one she felt, particularly not as the image she held of the Marshal slowly became less of an unbending soldier spun from her own fantasies and more of a man made of flesh and blood.

This far into their journey, their camaraderie was finally solid and easy as they pushed northwards and mapped out more of the terrain. She’d learned to catalogue the tells of his emotions, committing to memory the profile of the strong jaw silhouetted against the sun, the lines of his face as he smiled or frowned, the slackness of it at rest. There were nights where she’d been excruciatingly aware of his nearness only to spend it in feverish dreams that left her panting awake with a myriad of unslaked thirsts.

During the day, the Marshal was surprisingly easy to converse with, his intelligence and knowledge impressively wide. Their discussions delved deep into strategy and tactical knowledge, meandered around difficult portions of history and tonight, finally settled on Shang’s early days in the imperial army.

As a youth, he’d been more of a rebel than she could have ever envisioned, the unwillingness to stay true to the family path of becoming a scholar-officer changing only after his father had enough of his misdeeds and mischief and placed him out of sheer desperation, in the stocks for a week after his repeated lectures of honour and duty had gone ignored.

And now he stayed, breathed and fought to honour the life of his father.

Perhaps they both did. War was unforgiving, after all and broke the long chains of generations.

She in turn, told him the light-hearted moments around their dinner table. On some nights, she even ventured into the few war stories her own father told the family.

As though by some unspoken agreement, they never spoke once about the past five years.

She was fully aware that the reprieve was only temporary.

Mulan guarded her secrets jealously—her identity and gender above all, knowing that the knowledge she carried could be the very reason for her execution under the Marshal's weighty hand and his unbending sense of justice.

The faint metallic clinks of Shang’s armour chased the weighty thoughts away.

Without realising it, she’d actually ridden up to a high glade in the hills surrounded by tall boulders. Shang had already dismounted, unloading his bundle from the saddle.

“We stop here for the night.”

Thankfully, he had always chosen the places for their sojourns well: near heavily wooded areas with streams or near stagnant ponds, his only request was that either one of them kept watch at a respectable distance while the other washed. It was a request to which she had been more than happy to accede to.

Like the gallant commanding officer he was, he’d ordered her to the fast-flowing stream perfumed by the night-blooming flowers to wash for the night.

Not wanting to take advantage of his generosity, she’d made a run for it, stripped, washed and finished in minutes, then returned to sit by the cackling fire around which their tents were pitched just as Shang stood up and left.

He’d been oddly quiet and tense the last few days, keeping his own counsel and speaking only when he needed to.

A mental run through of the region they’d traversed into made her wonder she could attribute his battle-ready stance to being in a hostile tribal region, but from what she recalled, they were yet days away before they came to a vulnerable point on the map.

She feared that she had in some manner, caused him offence. But he was never cruel or judgemental in the way he addressed her, leaving her even more bewildered at the sudden change in their easy dynamic.

Her maudlin musings were brought to a halt when she heard Shang's faint footsteps tapping across the wooded glade. He emerged with his body still wet, only wearing his pants and his tunic flung casually over his shoulder still dripping from the hem.

Despite having lived amongst soldiers for years, it still took Mulan a while to get past the reflex of wanting to turn away each time she saw a bare torso. Just as she thought she had succeeded in schooling her reaction, an uncharacteristic heat crept up her cheeks at the Marshal’s tightly-muscled body as he moved in front of her to toss more twigs into the fire.

This…unnamed, growing fascination with Li Shang was unseemly, she reminded herself sternly. Who was a…remarkably striking man but who was also her commanding officer, no less.

Handing over some rations to him, she made certain that their hands did not touch.

“The evening meal, Marshal.”

He sighed as he took the food from her.

“We are possibly a thousand _li_ from the nearest village. Do you truly believe that military rank holds importance and weight that far from the capital?”

Her eyebrows nearly touched her hairline. The rank between them that served as appropriate distance had never been questioned, much less so given that it was him who’d brought it up.

“Marshal…?”

“My name is Shang. Say it.”

She cracked a hard cake in half and nibbled its flaky corner, trying to muster a response that would satisfy him. Swallowing down a throat gone dry, she took a sip of water before replying. “Rank and respect are deeply embedded in a soldier’s mindset. Habits are hard to break. Maybe these habits should not be broken.”

Shang slid her a sideways glance. “But not impossible.”

Her acquiescence was slow in coming. “No, I guess not.”

The Marshal placed his rations down, eased to his feet and paced the short perimeter of their camp site. Frustration rolled off him in palpable waves as his boots kicked up the dirt with the force of his steps.

“You confuse me, Ping.”

The conversation was taking a disconcerting turn.

 _She_ confused him? In fact, it was he who _confounded_ her.

That he’d singled her out, chosen her to scout out the enemy camp out of a hundred more able soldiers—all because of a sense of familiarity and a moment in time that they’d shared as soldiers in combat five years ago? Then talked with her like a friend for days before reverting to the polite but distant speech of a commander?

Mulan dared a glance up at him—the scowl still cutting deep grooves his brow—and immediately brought her eyes back down, to track the tip of a tiny orange flame that flickered and sputtered out only for a larger one to dance into its place.

Squaring her shoulders, she inhaled deeply and tried for levity instead.

“How so? I am but a simple, junior officer.”

Shang said nothing, just merely waited until she finally, _finally_ found the mettle to meet his intense stare.

“There is more to you than meets the eye. Pieces of you that do not seem to slot neatly into each other.”

The hard glint in his eyes said that he was on the warpath. She knew by now that the grim undertone meant that he would leave no stone unturned, that he wouldn’t stop until he had gotten what he wanted out of her.

Her heart leapt into her throat, the pounding of her heart suddenly loud and fast in her ears.

 _What if—what if_ he dug too deep…and…and found—

This was all she knew now—this very life that belonged to strict routine and discipline and doing whatever the emperor decreed, so far removed from the days waiting for the matchmaker’s appointment or tilling the field or getting lost in domestic chores. To have it taken away because of her duplicity was not a consequence she had the courage to entertain.

The surge of panic brought her to her feet just as he stalked towards her, backpedalling her hard into the thick, slab of a boulder that shielded their campsite from prying eyes and nocturnal predators. Her palms came up to his hands where they gripped her, her short nails cutting into his skin as she dug her feet in to keep her balance.

“Tell me, who are you?” The question, phrased like a command, brooked no objection.

Pinned immobile, Mulan could not trust herself to speak, the hardness of his body against hers obliterating all thought and action.

Gone was the distance, the easy friendship and laughter—this was Shang at his most honest, his most brutal, just as her own voice and courage were failing. She swallowed hard, trying to throttle the fear.

The very things he’d thought defined her as a soldier—courage and determination—now felt like a joke in contrast. If he only knew how long her deception had stretched on—long before the avalanche—would he still call her friend? Would she still have his trust?

She did not know how to be vulnerable to him, as long as there was a part of her that remained shielded. But there was the uncanny sense that there were going to be difficult questions that she actually wanted to give him honest answers to.

Instinct however, made her press back against him, a reciprocal action that brought their faces and bodies impossibly closer. She flushed under his unrelenting stare, her own chest rising and falling in perfect synchronisation to each heaving breath of his, testing her fraying restraint.

“Shang…”

Then she was somehow arching forward and clawing him _into_ her, drawing his head and lips down to meet hers, her fingers working of their own accord to wind through the hair that he had loosened from its tie after his bath, wanting more of the heat and hardness of him…needing the closeness that she didn’t know how to articulate.

The grip on his hair was her only sure anchor as she felt herself falling into his strength that bolstered her upright. His fingers drew gentle lines on her cheek, leaving scorched trails in their wake as she left her own brand of pressure on him as hers moved through his hair, down to his broad shoulders, finally resting on his straining biceps.

The firelight cast a filigreed shadow on them, its ambient heat replaced by the man who was torching her alive with slightest of touches.

But then he moved, lifting her high so that her legs curled around his hips as he drove her back into the hard stone. Winding his hands around her wrists, he pinned them above her head against the boulder as he sealed his lips over hers again and drank deeply of the gasps she made. Their hips ground hard together as she mindlessly sought for relief in a way she didn’t know how to alleviate—

A measure of sanity returned as he pulled away slightly to release her, his bewilderment cutting through the sudden loss of contact.

“What is it about you, Ping?”

His distressed plea was as fraught as it was heavy with need.

With his hair untied and the slight shadow coating his jaw, Shang far from resembled the put-together, stoic Marshal she’d always known. He was as open as she’d ever seen him, the wildness in his eyes betraying the attraction and the desire that surely had to be similarly stamped on her face.

He gave her no time to reply, instead skipping his lips downwards to graze her skin, rasping words against the column of her neck—words that became unintelligible sounds in the harshness of her own breaths.

Mulan knew then what she was about to do would cost her everything. Possibly even more than what she could ever give. At present, she was sequestered in a space that left her permanently as a boy who never seemed to reach adulthood. The freedom to be who she was lay on the other side of the line that was so easily crossed.

Here, blanketed under the open sky where it was easy to pretend they were just Mulan and Shang, perhaps she could be braver than she’d ever been.

“Let me show you.”

_Courage._

Reaching downwards, she took his hand, intertwined their fingers and brought them up to the gap high on her chest where the tunic folded shut. It parted under the slight pressure of their fingers as she moved to draw the left sleeve down her shoulder, followed by the right—

A sharp intake of breath.

He’d caught sight of the tight binding around her chest.

“You’ve been hurt. How did yo—”

Shaking her head mutely, she brought both their hands to the edge of the binding cloth. With a small twist of her wrist, their fingers slid underneath its fold at her side. Was it her imagination, or was his hand also shaking, like hers were?

Without the usual tension that she’d put on the cloth to keep it taut during the day, the thin white strip unravelled easily to pool in a small heap on the ground. Free of the constriction, she inhaled sharply, the movement of her rising chest bringing his eyes to exactly what he needed to see.

She’d never felt more exposed to him at this very moment—with her torso fully bared to the elements and to him, to the recent searing heat of his body and lips against hers, to the truth that she’d just served him in the most brutal fashion.

Waiting for him—for his _anger_ , his _absolution and judgement_ —to discover that her entire life had first been a desperate play to keep the family honour intact, then later on for survival…just this rationale alone barely kept her from splintering to pieces.

The vibrating silence seemed to stretch on as she watched him stare, up until the moment shocked comprehension dawned in his eyes.

“Mulan.”

Her vocal cords sounded like fractured glass, the higher-pitched timbre gradually taking over as her natural speaking voice finally emerged.

Hearing the feminine lilt, he jerked stunned eyes up to meet hers, clarity slowly replacing the haze of lust that was just a minute ago, dictating his actions.

“You asked me who I am. My name is Fa Mulan.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Historical note:  
> The Sui Dynasty lasted from 589-618 A.D (38 years), and the pre-Sui years were filled with conflict with the northern tribes and warlords who tried to assert their authority over each other. Finally, in 589 A.D, a man of mixed northern blood called Yang Jian became the first Sui Emperor, also known as Wen Di, only by making peace with several warlords and the northern tribes for a unified China.
> 
> His death was a suspected murder believed to have been engineered by his own son, who came to be known as Yang Di. Yang Di reversed policies made by his father, undoing the short peace when he drove the northern tribes out of the border regions. He was not a true black villain but at most, an ambivalent character that many historians still try to figure out.


	8. The Revelation

First Li Shang was kissing a man, then he was kissing a woman, staring in disbelief at her bared chest with their hands still entwined while the space between their lower bodies stayed virtually non-existent. Her legs were slung low across his hips, their softness a world of contrast to his own bulkier body frame.

If this was a dream, each scene felt more preposterous than the last as dreams were wont to do. To hear her name spoken in a woman’s voice was yet another jolt in his chest, the first jolt happening when she’d loosened the binding that had so cleverly fooled everyone for years.

Anger at her deception was his first instinctive response. He froze where he stood, eyes squeezed shut, tamping down on the roiling waves of fury, fighting for calm to return and his heartbeat to slow in the wake of her momentous revelation.

No, he hadn’t known at all. Strung along with the rest of the imperial army, it seemed.

_Hadn’t he?_

Or maybe a part of him had always suspected that Ping had never really been a man. A suspicion that he’d easily cast to the back of his mind as ridiculous musings when everyone knew that only men conscripted into the imperial army.

And yet, here he was, faced with an aberration he simply didn’t know how to deal with.

Again, hadn’t he known?

The earliest memories of Ping flipped through his mind like the brisk flapping of a bird’s wings as it took flight. Wasn’t Ping the only reticent one as the men joked crudely among themselves about their wives or their kept women; was he ever present as the rest of the troops took their communal baths in the stream or at meal times? Hadn’t Ping seemed to lack the usual strength for the callisthenics that even boys could do?

And on and on it went as the fragmented pieces of his mental picture of Ping locked and slid into place.

On hindsight, how had he missed the obvious?

Ping—no, _Mulan_ —flinched as he abruptly tore away from her, leaving her standing against the boulder to pace their perimeter again.

Her arms now crossed over her chest defensively, she inched away to reach for the cloth binding and tunic.

Seeing her hunched over herself forced the air from his lungs. His anger faded as quickly as it had sparked.

Even that short moment when he turned away from her was a moment he regretted. Instead, Shang found himself tearing the binding strips away from her again, emotion and impulse overruling reason and logic.

“Don’t. Please…please don’t hide.” It sounded like part-command, part-plea with his mouth and head barely operating a level above a blank state. “Never again.”

With her head still hanging heavy, he closed the distance and slid a knuckle under her chin, noticing now the details of her that escaped him earlier in the fog of passion: the warm smattering of freckles along her shoulders where the summer sun turned its pale colour golden, the shadows that length of her lashes cast on the narrow curve of her cheekbones, the frantic pulse of her heartbeat under skin—

“Are you afraid?”

She’d risked her life with this revelation knowing he had the authority and power to execute punishment as he saw fit.

“Yes,” she told him simply. “Of too many things.”

Her spectacular dishing of honesty now demanded his own; Shang hadn’t known just how much he needed her confidence to cast a look at his own mental state.

“Don’t be.”

Only now—as she stood fully exposed—could he finally admit that he’d kept his disdain for her longer than necessary. Five years ago, he’d clung stubbornly to the mantra of making men out of boys when it was particularly Ping that he’d sought to single-out. To despise weakness was unquestioning behaviour prevalent in the military psyche, and Ping’s abundance of it had undoubtedly made him initially overlook the other useful qualities that Ping had learned to use to his own advantage.

Like the rest of the soldiers, he’d come to observe Ping’s fortitude, the work ethic, the quiet but steely will that put him ten paces in front of everyone by the time training had ended. Even then, Shang had questioned his own sexual inclinations when Ping seemed to wedge himself in the forefront of his idle thoughts.

But contempt had nebulously morphed to approval to want as time wore on, and he’d only driven those emotions deeper by forcing her to rise to his challenges again and again. It would be hypocrisy of the highest order if he tore into her for her deception without addressing the denial of his own attraction that he’d constantly termed for himself as _fond admiration_.

Ping was his subordinate and a mandatory presence in the imperial army. But Mulan was an illegitimacy, and such treason was punishable by execution or total banishment. She’d compromised her position and risked it for him, though he was as complicit as her the moment his earlier actions had taken an irrevocable turn. Together, they had already defied enough military protocols to be charged with the harshest punishments in the imperial court.

And yet it was the furthest thing from his mind.

Why, indeed?

The stark truth of this apparent lapse in judgement, when it had sunk in, was a thick, wooden pole’s strike to his head.

All things considered, he’d first loved her as Ping.

Reluctantly at first, then inexorably and irreversibly when grudging admiration gave into attraction and fell into the encroaching realisation that Ping was so much more than the weak, pathetic kind of boy he’d been so quick to denounce. For months, she had stood under everything he had thrown at her, endured the taunts in stoic silence and did it all better than him by the end.

Until the cataclysmic turn of events at the Tung Shao pass forced her away and left him reeling for entertaining foolish notions that Ping would remain under his command for the foreseeable time.

Shang had taken it with his head held high and carried Ping’s memory deep, then marched on with life however the imperial generals saw fit. One sapping campaign after the next, one difficult training session after the next. Duty and honour had governed his every action ever since until weeks ago, when Ping had tumbled outside his tent and burst back into his life.

The same cycle started again; he’d gone from incomprehensible happiness to seeing Ping, to wanting that connection that eluded him the first time, to tumbling into tortured need that felt forbidden to even speak aloud.

But Ping wasn’t exactly Ping now, was it? He was in effect, the woman soldier who kept making him question everything about himself.

What he did next with a woman in his arms was an irreversible judgement call. A road that if he walked down, came with consequences he couldn’t foresee, even though the conclusion was already foregone, five years in coming.

Yet with her, he couldn’t help himself. So many lines that he’d crossed and would cross for her.

“Don’t be afraid.” Shang repeated himself, occupying himself with the feel of her hair as he sorted his thoughts. The strands—gleaming black, like the finest silk, kinked with gentle waves with the band that had kept it up—flowed through his fingers, their blunt tips where she’d roughly shorn them off brushing and tickling his open palm. “Don’t hide. Your secret is safe. With me.”

Did he know what he was saying?

"Never again.” Her surprising defiance was a promise and her promise as good as capitulation.

“Tell no one else,” he warned, not wanting to imagine what could have happened to her in less than ideal circumstances.

Gratitude flooded her face.

“At all costs, you have to—”

The rest of his plea dissolved when she cupped a hand over his mouth and a shake of her head.

For a brief moment, he glanced skyward, debating his next course of action, battling the weight of the brewing conflict he felt.

“No more, please.” Her whisper was a soft petal brushing over his lips, scattering his thoughts. “Not now.”

And then their bodies were tangling, her grip on his face bruising and the swirl of her hips into his insistent. Her own driving need first flagellated him, then quelled the rising sense of guilt he felt for wanting _her_. The pleasure was white-hot and cutting, from the scent of her hair, to the musk of her skin, to the depth of her tongue in his mouth…to her singled-minded exploration of him that blinded him to everything else but her.

oOo

Long fingers drew lines down her bare shoulder and continued over the thin sheet that covered her from waist down. In the pre-dawn light that bleached tent’s interior a pale blue, the sight of Shang kneeling at her side sending a visceral jolt of awareness of their shared space.

The initial worry that had been eclipsed by the heaving waves of sensation resurfaced, compounded by a distinct lack of sleep last night.

“Did you mean it? When you said no one will know—”

“I made you a promise, Mulan. I told you that you had my trust. Now, I need _yours_. Outside these tent walls, you are my subordinate. But you’re also a friend.” His voice gentled slightly, the sharp, shrewd gaze never leaving her face. “Someone I trust and have faith in. But it would help to know everything else.”

A long moment passed. He was still watching her, smoothing her hair, patiently waiting.

She knew she owed him this much, even if talking about the past gave her an uncomfortable, creaking sensation in her chest.

“Five years ago, after the—I wanted to go home. After the battle, as you can remember. And this—” Mulan vaguely gestured to her chest, “was the reason why I didn’t want to stay.”

Shang shifted and sat little straighter, his steady, tangible presence bolstering the sudden rush that turned her limbs into jelly.

“You refused any medical help.” Distress tightened the lines around his eyes and mouth as the memory resurfaced. “Only that I saw you past the mountain safely.”

There was a softness in his face she hadn’t seen before and it bolstered her strength to continue.

“You know why now.”

She’d thought that she was beyond help, or at least it was what she had believed back then. A hard slice across the abdomen, a punctured lung, a rattling cough and some broken ribs pointed at internal injuries that would turn fatal without immediate medical attention.

Had she stayed, Shang would have insisted on the camp physician’s examination and that would have signalled the end of everything. Back then, she had only thought of the worst, not giving any latitude for the allowance that Shang might have been more accepting of her taking her father’s place, or that he could have found a way to protect them both.

She’d chosen to protect her identity over her own safety, even if it meant bleeding to death partway down the mountain. And if she’d simply fallen off the cliff, how could they still charge a dead soldier with desertion?

The fearful, paranoid decision was a stupid one in retrospect; luck or fate had it such that she’d found a way to live through no clever means of her own.

Getting lost in her memories was like watching those scenes through murky water. Reality—both past and present—was distorted in this timeless space, yet sharpened by the flood of emotions that always accompanied this part of the story.

Suddenly restless, Mulan pulled herself up and reached for the binding, stopping only when he put his arms around her. With a gentleness that she was unused to, he dressed her instead, carefully winding the cloth so that its tension around her body did not hamper her breathing.

The simple, helpful act made her eyes burn hot.

“I barely made it past the next village…it was burnt and blackened, just like the rest. I must have passed out. I woke up far from home. There were two people—a man and a woman—wanderers, with no allegiance to kingdoms or their rulers, tending only to what were their own. They moved from place to place, sometimes on their own, sometimes following a line of trading caravans where they would stay for days or weeks until they moved again.”

The early days were nothing but hours that ticked by in a haze of pain, blood and soothing voices. Her field of awareness, first confined to a narrow cot, widened gradually to the interior of a colourful tent, and when she could finally stand and walk, broadened to a jaw-dropping riot of colours of the caravans, to the wares that the traders, to the brilliant hues of their clothing sold that surrounded her.

Colour was her predominant remembrance of this interlude. And these people who had been a part of her life for a short time? She thought of them now in shades of red and yellows and oranges, like bright pinpricks that had shifted her life in a different if transient way, unlike the drab and grey tones of the imperial army, of their armour, of the threatening sky in the mountains.

“I think I was with them for nearly two years. Experienced the way they lived as my body healed. They taught me how to fight a little differently too,” she laughed low and ruefully. “There was so much of a wild freedom in them that when I was there, I forgot that I was a soldier, or that I was pretending to be a man. To them, I was just a woman in need. No family, with no name.”

Curiosity was etched in Shang’s face. “And you left them to go home?”

“But soon enough, I knew that I needed to head home. I packed and waited until the caravans headed east again.”

“That must have taken a year.”

“Two I think. It took two years before I was strong enough to travel on my own.” Mulan put her hands over his, savouring the comfort that his touch brought. “But if it were only so simple as that. A disagreement between the merchants turned ugly. There was a fight.”

She sighed, recalling how it’d escalated so quickly until bloodshed seemed an inevitability.

“The woman threw herself in front of her man as they fought and took a knife to her stomach. He did not want to live without her so he tied himself to her funeral pyre and set them both alight. A day later, I threw their ashes in the wind, then turned east on my own.”

He gaped at her, his jaw slackening. “When did you return home?”

Mulan thought of the skirmishes that she’d gotten caught in...in some tea houses when she stopped for the night, in the narrow alleyways where some bandits had caught up with her, in the open plains when the moon had hung high. Of the fights where she’d learned the hard way to scrape by, to survive, with no thought to the art of war or swordplay.

“It was a hard, long journey. I travelled as Ping, but it seemed that even certain kinds of men aren’t welcome in some places.”

He looked at her sharply. “What do you mean?”

It was hard to meet his eyes. Instead, she let her gaze wander to the high point of the tent, to its sloping sides and finally back to him, hesitant to put into words what happened later.

“There were fights. Sometimes I won, sometimes I lost. But I survived.” A smile broke through, even though grief was now riding close to the surface. “When I stepped into my village, it was my brother who saw me first. Then my grandmother ran to meet me. That night, my family cooked a meal fit for the emperor himself.”

There had been questions from her curious family—so many of them, all intrusive. But the wretched details had somehow become personal wounds that she kept silent about, as she allowed her family to think that her lacerations and injuries from the recent scuffles were battle scars rather than from her perilous journey home.

“Even my grandmother knew that something wasn’t right. But she said nothing more. Neither did my mother. Together, they helped me get better. After the bruises faded and the injuries healed, life was easy for a time. We worked the land, I put away the armour and sword. The matchmakers did not visit even once in all that time. I think my family knew I needed some peace and quiet.”

His deepening frown made her laugh. “Ancestors be thanked. But why did you come back to the army?”

For a period of time, domestic routine had anaesthetised the pain of loss and the anguish of looking into the mirror at a stranger who stared back at her. She’d found an odd sense of rest found looking at the neat rows of planted grains that shone golden and green in the endless cycles of sunrise and sunset. They’d temporarily taken away the vivid clarity of blood, screams and tears in a head so addled with memories of brutality and violence she hadn’t seemed able leave behind.

Her family had known that she had returned home a changed person and had not sought anything else to disrupt this newfound equilibrium.

But the burden of bringing honour to them had never really lifted from her shoulders—she’d left for the army, undergone training, got involved in a skirmish with the Huns and returned a shadow of herself with nothing to show for it. There were no commendations, no visits from commanding officers or sparkling scroll of her deeds in the field.

“My father was going to visit a province for some trade. I took his place instead because his leg was hurting. In the time I was away, the Huns came.”

It was a familiar narrative in this twist of the tale: she acting as her father’s replacement, only with dire consequences.

She saw as the realisation sank in. “Your family?”

“Nowhere. I thought they were missing at first. I thought they went to hide.” The sliver of hope she had for their survival was extinguished when she’d seen their bodies. “I buried them, took my armour and headed for Luoyang. Coming back as Ping was the only thing I could do.”

Even though his eyes were pinched, his lips were a soothing warmth on hers that helped settle the intense ache in her chest. “So much death.”

“So much death,” she echoed sadly.


	9. The Trap

Setting up camp for the night involved little thought by this stage. Shang worked in silence, his movements in sync with Mulan’s as they gathered firewood, watered the horses and sorted their rations.

He shook out their map and studied their recent markings again, wondering if they had taken a turn that they shouldn’t have.

After following the tracks for weeks, uncharted territory awaited them. Fog had rolled low into the valley in the late afternoon and left the sky a threatening grey as the horses went up and up into rocky terrain that showed the ruins of where a fortress and its ramparts might have once stood.

With this low level of light, it was near impossible to see where the ancient walls lay, but its weathered foundation stones still stood, melded into part of the earth.

Mulan paced the edge of the clearing, her gaze intent on something in the distance. Listening.

For a moment, he watched her, then looked at the tree line. Only then did he realise what she was looking at—a dark green swath of trees that started abruptly up the side of a mountain; below it, a charred patch of forest stretched down the plains, having destroyed what was once arable land.

With a disorienting sensation that seemed to tilt his world sideways, it dawned on him that they’d wandered into Hun country.

Looking across to where Mulan stood, he saw the tension tight around her eyes, her gait stiff as her movements turned economical and quick.

The air had turned oppressive in the humidity and despite its coolness, sweat had turned the tunic under his armour uncomfortably damp. Like her, the odd, shifting air was putting him on a knife’s edge as he tried to quell the restless energy that rose within.

They’d passed a mound of bones today—flesh picked off fully by vultures and vermin—and with a few skulls impaled on spears.

Could anyone be inured to a sight such as this even after riding into years of war?

He’d stopped and examined the remains. Took on the unpleasant task of identifying them through any sort of fabric or marks he could find. What he hadn’t expected was for Mulan to do the same. He should have castigated himself for being surprised.

Together, they’d drawn the conclusion that these must have belonged to a past generation of soldiers that first fell to the Huns, then to the elements.

Seeing that had driven home how the constant invasions and the ever-present push-backs had left a legacy of violence that was impossible to shake off. And if Shang thought himself war-weary, the extraordinary way Mulan had trodden across the last five years made his own experience pale in comparison. Of all the stories she could have told, he hadn’t ever imagined that it would have included nomadic gypsies and a dead family or that the passage of these years would be marking her with tragedy over and over again.

At first, it had sounded like the tales told by merchant-travellers who were better known for their embellishments and their penchant for recasting facts in a less than honest light for coin. But the scars on her body that marked this journey said that she had given him the truth.

A distant sound—like the sway of branches to the wind—stole his attention.

He stopped.

Signalled to Mulan to move out of the glade and out of the enclosed space.

Casting a quick glance at the foliage around him, he moved to join her, drawing his sword and knife as he stooped into a crouch.

Then he saw it…a flickering pinprick of light in the darkness at the limits of his vision, obscured by the fog and the foliage when the rough guttural cadence of _Tujue_ speech burst through the glade.

There was barely time to heft his sword to meet a descending blade as he scrambled to his feet and met the crushing force of another downward swing with his legs leveraged against the side of a rock.

High above, a bird of prey circled, swooped low and screeched.

To his left, he heard the clang of metal against metal as Mulan sliced through the dizzying blue of a rider who had emerged from their rear.

Behind him, their horses whinnied and ran, their reins sliced to ribbons.

Shang swiped away a flanked attack on him, skidding back against the grass and soil to swing the other way when two others descended on him. Then pivoted backwards when he heard Mulan’s cry and the tearing of fabric, thrusting his sword into the soft space of flesh between a Hun’s armour pieces.

The next clash had him staggering back even as he drove into their dizzying counters. Then the broad side of a stick on his left threw him sideways, his ribs throbbing as a burst of darkness and grit exploded in his vision—

He rolled sideways, narrowing avoiding the tip of a spear that’d sprung from some place above, ducking and parrying the blades that kept coming.

The next run robbed him of his sword. A booted foot clamped tight and hard on his arm and another on his neck, stopping his fighting instinct to move, to get to his feet.

In the falling twilight, they seemed to keep coming. Masked, armoured and helmeted men who knew that he and Mulan were as good as orphaned, rogue soldiers far from the rules of engagement.

With a burst of rapidly-fading energy, he reared himself upwards, displacing the man on him with a grab and twist of both ankles—

A sharp pain bloomed on the side of his head, throwing everything into darkness.

oOo

_Fear had driven the emperor to war and now they marched resolutely onwards. Gossip was potent, idle talk unfolding during the long journey north._

_"Mundok fears no one." Someone had casually mentioned._

_"Perhaps he was a greater strategist than the emperor ever thought him to be.”_

_“Men talk about what they fear the most.”_

_“Do not underestimate the Gokuryo fortress and its leader. He is no fool.”_

_Shang worried unduly—it was what the other Captains said of him._

_“He is no god either!”_

_"The truth, Shang?" Another captain had scoffed. "The emperor fears an alliance between the Huns and Mundok. Two million troops? Why this big a campaign?"_

_It had rained for days, a censure of the gods, an infectious wetness that festered in Gokuryo that had brought on the lethal chills in soldiers. Their boots were heavy with sludge, the heavy armour an increasingly cumbersome burden._

_A detour! He heard the command as clearly as he heard the pouring rain._

_The Ryoha river had been blocked, barricaded with an iron-clad bastion. The overflow from the recent rains had run off, flooding the desolate plains with knee-high sludge. There was no tactical advantage here, not with the changed terrain._

_Had it meant that Mundok had known of their advance?_

_And then idle talk had ceased. They had crossed into Gokuryo._

_Emptiness._

_It was his first thought. Heart-breaking emptiness and a suspicious void where only the breaths of swirling mists and chill winds were heard. The disturbing lack of villagers, the razed farms…where were they?_

_There was only the enduring stench of burnt soil and scorched wood, but nary a soul around, hardly the spoils of war._

_With this blockage, they needed to backtrack westwards and then advance again southwest of the Ryoha. It would cost them valuable time, and a few days’ worth of precious food supplies. They ran low in stock with the lack of villages to plunder, losing several men daily to the humiliation of starvation rather than to the glory of dying in battle._

_He hadn’t known how long he’d ridden for, when the fever and the chills set in a day later._

_Only the thought of victory spurred him onwards until his horse came to the banks of the wide and mighty Salsu river—_

_There were stories that it swelled with heavy power with the annual runoff, rife with yellow mud and had swallowed all that crossed its treacherous path._

_Instead, the Salsu was a long, stagnant pond fed by tiny trickling streams—an impossible sight but a reprieve. Finally, it was an open path into Pyongyang, a mere thirty miles to victory—a victory that had been mapped over the course of several months._

_The rush of water—first, a whisper that grew to a steady flow, then a thunderous shaking—reached his ears._

_He’d brought his horse in, realising belatedly that they stood downstream of the avalanched precipitate, dammed up with the power to unleash a suffocating current with the power to sweep a million troops away._

_Warn the rest!_

_His horse reared, tossing him hard into the stream—_

_No time—!_

_An infinite wall of water stretched up and up, bouncing hard along the distant canyon walls, a towering force hemmed in only by implacable stone. Straight into his path._

_Until the cliffs disappeared into nothing and the rocks loosened their restraints._

_The waves curved and crashed downward, lifting him up and sideways and over, making him freewheel in its raging current. Water was streaming from his nose, his eyes, sharp edges of dislodged rocks already tearing pieces of his armour loose, gorging his skin._

_It burned…it stung…it throbbed—_

_Then it all went black._

_At some indeterminate hour when the sun rode low in the sky, he blinked awake—to a platoon of injured and exhausted soldiers running about in chaos and with the order to push on._

_They threw him another horse and some ill-fitting armour and weapons that’d been someone else’s; his had long bolted, his every other possession lost in the floodwaters._

_And Mundok's army still waited, a solid wall of men and catapults and fortified towers that made Pyongyang impregnable._

_At the command, he’d nocked an arrow. Then another and another. They arched high, their downward trajectory inconsequential as the crossbows flew and fire lit the night sky red. Around him lay dismembered heads and limbs and the screams of dying soldiers._

_His arms had moved of their own accord, had drawn swords and knives, mowing through those who whirled and ran into his path._

_Minutes or hours could have ticked by…he had no sense of time passing as he pushed forward blood-soaked ground._

_Men screamed. Some whimpered. Another begged to live._

_The edges of his vision blurred as he stumbled back, dropping onto his knees. There was a tingling at the back of his neck that he couldn’t understand—something was dripping into his eyes, trickling down his chin._

_Spots of red, on the grass. The sudden swaying…he was dizzy, his head spinning—every limb disobedient to his command to move, to run._

_Was that the order to retreat?_

_A fresh, sharp sting of tears surprised him as he wiped his hand over his cheek. Somehow, he’d been holding up another soldier, then another, pushing them along to safety._

_But his own strength soon failed, and another had hefted him up, and pushed him along, past the plains that demarcated the battle lines. He realised he was crying blood, sweat and tears. So were the others who limped, clutching their aching chests, weeping, kissing wet Chinese soil like repentant sinners._

oOo

Shang started violently, yanked out of the trap of nightmares by the sounds of a vicious struggle, feeling to the steady throb of a head wound. In an instant, he realised that he was bound tightly to a tree. He must have fallen unconscious when the Huns had attacked.

A furtive glance about him revealed that they were in a wooded area, hidden from the light of the moon and tied face down in the bushes. He twisted once, twice, to catch a glimpse of his surroundings.

The unfamiliarity of the landscape confirmed what he’d initially suspected—they’d moved past the steppes and far deeper north than they would ever venture out. More worryingly, the great fortifying bulwarks that carried the legacy of the Qin’s fortifications did not seem to exist anymore.

The Huns had been moving freely—more freely than the palace scholars or tacticians have assumed.

Two successive shouts brought his head swinging wildly towards his left, followed by the sickening crack of bones coming out of joint and the dull thud of fist meeting flesh.

_Mulan!_

He heard the strange, convoluted tongue of the _Tujue_ —jeers and cheers coming from a group of men around a fire while a Hun fought a restrained stubborn prisoner who darted around the man’s strikes and moved like a cornered animal.

It was a game they’d made out of this, taunting and toying with their prisoner the way a predator trussed up its prey before tiring of it.

Finally, she swam into view…struggling against her bonds, slithery as a snake, struggling and kicking at her larger attacker, then ducking under his bulk as he attempted a hit to her face.

The gradual erosion of men’s tolerance for the self-indulgent game came quickly. Shang watched in horror as they strung her up a thick branch of a tree, her arms painfully taut as she continued to kick helplessly at them.

Out of a coarse Hun robe a whip was removed, its wielder mockingly tapping its handle in an open palm.

Then he swung high, its fall and thong a vulgar whistle in the air as he cracked it down on her back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Historical Note: The Battle of the Kingdom of Gokuryo (Korea)
> 
> The Sui Dynasty had launched several, frequent attacks on Gokuryo. In the last battle effort, Yang Di had sent 2 million soldiers to invade the Kingdom, but Gokuryo, under the great Korean strategist Ulchi Mundok, had expelled the Chinese troops with this unified army and the Korean population.
> 
> General Mundok, in the famous Battle of Salsu (612 A.D), had employed the 'Chong Ya' ('Scorched earth' tactic), evacuating the civilians southwards, leaving a ' field of nothing'. He had built iron-clad bastion around the river Ryoha, blocking enemy lines which led to Pyongyang and lured the Sui army to the Salsu River 30 miles north of Pyongyang. The Gokuryo army had retreated several times, giving the Sui army the illusion of victory, until they found themselves trapped between the Salsu river and the heavily guarded Pyongyang fortress.
> 
> Only less than 2700 Sui soldiers out of the 2 million managed to retreat.


	10. The unexpected arrival

The first lash of the whip tore a gash in her tunic and her bindings.

The second split her skin.

The third and fourth strokes felt like fire had been poured down her back.

Still, Mulan kept silent. They hadn’t stripped her of her tunic, and that small, unintended mercy kept them from the realisation of her gender which would have even more dire consequences for women who found themselves as war prisoners.

The fifth lash made her finally cry out, an involuntary scream that brought all the hope of keeping her gendered secret crashing down.

_Ancestors help me_.

The sudden silence was deafening.

The nausea deep in her belly intensified as she glanced at the bright triumph zigzagging across their faces, the detestable sneers aimed at the futility of her every move.

But the last swoop of the whip through the air had also swung her forward, cracking the branch onto which she hung. It tumbled to the dirt, taking her with it, just as the men who surrounded her burst into a cacophony of arguments, each one louder than the next.

In the midst of them, the one who held the whip stepped in.

Instinct reacted before thought. She rolled onto her front, struggling to get up, barely avoiding his lunge at her. Twisting around, making a fist with her bound hands, she swung hard into his gut.

He doubled over, even as the rest of the men swamped her—

The burning pain in her back was agonising fire, bruising, bleeding welts that torn open with each and every move she made; her bound hands and limbs had rendered anything else other than lumbering twists useless.

She came off her knees but was hurled face-first into the ground, as heavy feet planted themselves on her bleeding back, black dots still dancing in front of her eyes at the shock of having the wind slammed out of her. Dread however, morphed into heart-pounding panic when rough hands tore and pulled her pants downwards until the fabric bunched up around her ankles.

Her stomach heaved.

A palm tauntingly smacked the bare skin of her bottom, followed by a loud cheer from somewhere above—

The sudden bellow that sounded from the far left halted her captor's hand.

“Have you been long without a woman that mere semblance of one would send you into a fit of hysterics?” It was a harsh taunt, bent on degradation.

Relief was followed by the adrenaline let-down, a pins-and-needles-looseness flooding her limbs accompanied by uncontrollable shakes.

She was unceremoniously kicked aside as her captor growled in response, straightening before the commanding, imperious tone that demanded obedience.

“Loose their bonds.”

A blade slicked through the rope around her ankles and wrists in seconds but she lay face-down, unable to muster the energy even to lift her head upwards.

Whoever spoke, whoever had such power over these men was her saviour…even if the reprieve was temporary.

It was only when two gentle hands curled around her arms and waist, pulling up her pants that she realised it was Shang who now knelt on the ground with her, helping her upright.

Mulan blinked to see a man garbed in full armour sitting atop his horse watching them, calculating in his stance which unquestionably blended authority and arrogance in his bearing. Behind him, a small unit of soldiers stood at his command, battle-ready with their swords and spears drawn. They wore no imperial regalia, nor carried a flag.

Who were they, that even the Huns obeyed them without question, albeit with grudging reluctance?

“Return to your camp," the man still spoke, his gaze levelling with her captor. "I will speak to your leader myself,” he nodded at the both of them, “but they will come with me."

The nameless commander dismounted, and with a surprising gentleness placed a hand on Shang’s shoulder, whistling for a riderless horse.

“Ride with her," he told the Marshal softly before returning to his own mount. “We will speak again later.”

Wordlessly, Shang lifted her onto the horse, then mounted it behind her.

“Shang—”

“Don’t talk, save your strength.” His eyes were puzzlingly bright and glassy, a display of rare emotion and withheld tears.

She shifted, then immediately regretted the movement. “That man…who is he?"

He glanced at her worriedly when his hands pulled away from her back bloodstained. “You need a medic.”

His reluctance to answer her question rang odd. “Do you know that commander?”

He heaved a heavy sigh. “Li Yuan, a commander of a north-western region, and a distant relative of mine. Some call him a traitor.”

oOo

The small outpost that Li Yuan had commandeered was silent; the only noises were the disturbing and occasional moans that emanated from the convulsing figure on the pallet.

Thank the ancestors that her wounds weren’t allowed to fester. They’d brought on the fever and chills, but the physician had reassured Shang that Mulan would recover, even if her progress was slow.

He’d stayed in the tent with her, changing her bandages, cooling her red-hot-flushes as vigilantly as he could, worried about the malady that had slain too many soldiers who’d been caught by infection—before they could wake from their delirious mutterings.

Heaven only knew how she’d endured the beatings.

Shang only remembered impressions from their journey here; the periods of wakefulness and blackness, the shouts and grunts as Mulan tried to fight her captors, the rough hemp of the rope chafing his skin, the fury and sheer helplessness as he struggled against his own restraints as they tore her pants and readied to—

“There is a good chance of her surviving.”

The observation was curt, matter-of-fact and perhaps tinged with veiled sympathy. Shang stood up, turning to face the man who’d silently entered the tent.

Li Yuan was the only one in the Hun camp who spoke without the crude inflections of accented Chinese.

Decorated, unsmiling, unbending. A commander in his own right for some time and a trusted one at that, until he disappeared from the records. Word of his manoeuvrings among the nomadic tribes had made the palace quick to brand him a two-faced outcast.

That was all he’d known of this distant uncle of his, apart from them sharing the same illustrious family name that carried some weight in the imperial army. Other than that, there had been hushed talk long ago, of the rogue behaviour that Li Yuan exhibited where he sometimes stood with a foot across the lines that separated friend and foe.

“We owe you our thanks.”

Li Yuan stepped forward to stoop beside Mulan, not acknowledging Shang’s words.

“A foolish girl,” he murmured softly, as if to himself then turned to face Shang, a hooded expression on his face. “A woman dressed as a man in the army. I take it that you knew about this act of treason.”

It took all his willpower to school his face into an impassive mask, one that he knew betrayed not the slightest hint of emotion. “Who and what she is right now is not your concern.”

The corner of his uncle’s mouth twitched and then his tone darkened. “Men become stupid in the presence of a woman. Among the Huns, the women take up arms alongside the men. It is only the imperial army that insists on relying only on men’s strength.”

“How do you know that?”

“You are free to go," Li Yuan abruptly announced. He held up a hand, halting the surprise exclamation that he saw would have emerged from Shang's lips.

“Why did you save us?” A rough, disused voice rose from the cot.

Shang hurried to her side in concern when Mulan raised herself up to her elbows, distrust plain on her pale face. She smiled at him in response and raised a hand to signal that she could manage all on her own.

Li Yuan looked at Shang speculatively. “She’s strong. Skilled. An asset to any warring side.”

“You knew what would have happened when you stood in the shadows and watched them beat her.” His words were a challenge, pinpricks of anger tightening his fists.

“I did. But I intervened in good time.” There was no arrogance in Li Yuan’s tone, just a matter-of-fact recounting of his actions.

“Why did you save us?” Mulan repeated, more loudly this time.

Shang pivoted back to face his uncle. “Answer her question.”

“The answer lies in the ignorance that the capital has shown concerning the power of binding treaties between the northern tribes and the northern people of China. Bygone agreements that the ever-changing emperors scoff at. These stay despite what the emperors or the imperial strategists decide.”

“I don’t understand,” Mulan interjected.

“The northern tribes and I have an understanding. They pledge their allegiance to me, as do the northern aristocratic Chinese families. In return, they keep some lands they call theirs, we trade peacefully and people live in harmony, unlike what the palace wants. It is a simple equation.”

“But the house of Sui—”

“The house of Sui will not stand, _nephew_.” Contempt was written clearly in Li Yuan’s face. “The cost of war in the emperor’s bid for rapid expansion is bankrupting the treasury. The Grand Canal project has stolen away millions of farmers who do not till their land anymore. Land taxes have risen until ordinary folk cannot pay them. The emperor’s ‘mandate from heaven’ is nothing more than the arrogance and the pride of a weak man.”

Li Yuan sharply paced the small space of the tent, his heated treatise cut short as he visibly sought to regain his composure.

“The House of Sui will face its reckoning one day. But today is not that day. Go, and tell the emperor that we seek peace. That we have spared your lives as proof.”

“The constant, small attacks that the northern tribes stage on our camps and the villages directly contradict what you say about wanting peace. Shan-Yu—”

Li Yuan hummed softly in his throat. “Shan-Yu is an outlier, not to mention a fool. Not every Hun and his tribe seek the same as I do. Neither do they determine how we conduct our affairs. But for as many of those who pit themselves directly against the imperial army, there are just as many who throw in their coin with me.”

“What do you gain from letting us go?”

“As of now, you are my peace offering to your emperor. But one day, nephew, you and your woman will take up arms for me. You will show me your unwavering loyalty and pledge your allegiance to me. You will fight under my banner.”

Understanding dawned.

Which was why Li Yuan was willing to let them go—alive—and free. A favour now in return for a favour in the future.

So the stories, filtered and broken down as meaningless family gossip, held more than a smidgen of truth. Li Yuan had stepped out from under the imperial army’s banner, found his own band of loyalists and soldiers and brokered his own political alliances—as self-serving as they may be—through his influence and connections.

“If we refuse?”

A pause.

“Think carefully before you say anything you come to regret.”

Shang caught a brown packet that Li Yuan tossed at him. “An ultimatum, then.”

“I prefer to call it a choice.” With slight a wave of his hand, Li Yuan made it clear that the subject was closed. “Horses wait to carry you back to wherever you came from. Her fever has broken. My surgeon says that you should boil these herbs over the course of a day and drink them for her own health.” Turning slightly, he threw Shang a knowing look. “I shall see you soon, nephew.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The historical Li Yuan was from an aristocratic family background, which had become influential under the Northern Wei, his grandfather having created the Duke of Tang. His ancestry can be traced back to the Huns, and his ethnic background was a mixture of Chinese, Xianbei and Turkish. Early in his career Li Yuan had occupied a series of important military posts, and in 617 A.D he was appointed garrison commander at Taiyuan, a key strategic position in present-day Shaanxi, a place which was traditionally regarded as impregnable. For fiction’s sake, I’ve written him into history as a dark horse who played both sides of the warring factions.


	11. The Journey Back

If riding up north was hard, going down south was the opposite in the lower elevations. But it was slower too, when exhaustion had overtaken them early in the day and had forced them to recuperate on the sites that they’d previously camped in.

Mulan moved when she was told, stopped when she was tired—there was some respite found in trusting another to do what was necessary when exhaustion had seemed to wound itself so deeply into her bones.

For days, this had become their routine: cover the distance back and rest. The map, tucked and folded away in Shang’s pack, lay untouched. Their journey was measured and southwards, dictated by Shang’s insistence that she should not move any quicker than this.

Sleep, even if it was in the wake of Shang’s heat and closeness, did not come easy. For consecutive days, Mulan’s dreams were an incoherent jumble of winding lanes, black oxen and white horses, coaches and palanquins that swept past mansions of the rich, fire-breathing dragons and phoenixes that flew under the moonrise as peddlers and onlookers tossed coins towards the Bodhisattvas.

Nondescript faces flipped past her…bearded, dark-skinned wise men who hailed the Middle Kingdom as the great land of _Sinim_ , jesters who danced in the flower-strewn street. They melted away, taking the forms of her grandmother, her brother, her parents, whose faces crumbled into the dirt she’d buried them in.

Mulan snapped awake as the late afternoon sun was sinking past the horizon, the objects around her slowly coming back into focus: a half-filled pitcher of water, the mussed bed roll and blankets, neatly-folded up clothes, the empty bowl of Li Yuan’s concoction that she must have choked down some time yesterday.

The need for fresh air and an odd sound of fluttering wings brought her slowly out of the tent, both muscle and sinew protesting as she moved.

Shang stood at an outcropping of rock, a homing pigeon on his hand as he took the note from its leg and reattached another to it. She watched as it spread its wings in flight when he flicked his wrist upwards, visually tracing its straight path through the sky until it was a speck in the horizon.

He read the note, not turning around even though he must have heard her approach, the paper brought by the bird crushed in his fist.

She joined him where he was standing, waiting until he was ready to talk.

“How are you feeling?”

“There have been better days,” she admitted. “But thank you, for all you’ve done.”

“It isn’t the first time I’ve tended to the injured.” He looked at her pointedly. “Although it’s the first time I’ve tended to a woman who is also a soldier.”

She looked down at herself, dressed in a clean robe, unbound in the chest…spotless and fresh and mostly whole. “And you do it well…although there is nothing you have not seen before this.” The tinge of redness that appeared on Shang’s cheeks made her grin. “You’re a good nursemaid.”

He looked down at his clenched fist, then back up at her. “There was a short time when I served as a medic. I wanted the full experience of being a soldier after passing the exams. I wanted to try everything. Everyone laughed at General Li’s son when he had a newfound excitement about the military and its ways.”

A small, pensive smile twisted his lips as he led her to the makeshift seat next to the fire and pulled her close. “After training, I would go to the physicians and watch what they did. It wasn’t long before I was tending to the injured, especially after a great battle. The surgeons would otherwise be overwhelmed.”

“How long did you help them for?”

“Until I gained rank and was put in charge of other troops and their training. Months after you left, I rode under Yu Zhongwen’s banner into Gokuryo.”

She’d heard of the Gokuryo campaign, albeit some time later, when news finally filtered down to where she was. The conclusion was damning: the colossal attempt at marching into foreign land had also proven to be also a colossal failure.

“The emperor’s mobilisation of troops was unmatched. It must have been the greatest in thousands of years when the troops finally assembled. A sea of soldiers lined the plains, stretching as far as your eye can see.”

As hard as she tried, the scale of such military grandeur escaped her. “I can only imagine the sight.”

An odd, tangible silence stretched between them before Shang turned to face her. “What should have been great victory turned into defeat. The soldiers of Gokuryo lay in wait for us.”

“An ambush?”

The remembrance of what he encountered seemed to shrink him. “Superior tactics, above all. Gifted men who intelligently used the terrain to their advantage and a network of informants that helped strengthen every weakness.”

“What happened?”

“I couldn’t do much to save myself, much less anyone who stumbled past in me carrying their horrendous injuries. Many of them holding onto their spilling innards until they reached Chinese soil to die.”

The blunt visual he drew made her want to retch.

“Their ghosts still walk in my dreams.”

His admission fell like a sigh of defeat. In the growing dimness, she finally saw the pallor of his fatigue imprinted as smudges beneath his lids and a jaw pulled bowstring-tight. Like her, his night terrors never faded, and they were never, ever discussed, their hefty, invisible weight an additional burden to the heavy armour they wore.

She could tentatively offer her sympathy or say that she understood, but what she’d seen and heard most likely hadn’t come close to what he had. All she’d known was the hurt, numbness, the thousand-yard stares, the emptiness and confusion that lasted days on the occasions when she was alone—and still this was probably a fraction of what he’d felt.

Instead, Mulan reached for the hot water that bubbled merrily under the flames and brewed hot tea for the both of them.

Only after she’d taken a sip of her tea did she venture to ask the question that must be weighing on his mind as it had on hers. “What will you do with Li Yuan?”

He gave her a curious look. “What do you think we should do?”

“I asked you first.”

“I asked you next.”

“We owe him our lives,” Mulan started slowly, swirling her near-empty tea cup. The dregs of leaves circles lazily, flat and brown and heavy at the bottom. “And he made it clear that he expects something from you.”

“From the both of us,” he corrected.

Her brows raised incredulously, then drooped as soon as the implications of his statement sank in. “I suppose you’re right. It is treason, no matter how you want to look at it.”

“If we take up arms with Li Yuan, we will be called traitors to the house of Sui.” His tone was flat, unyielding. “But consider this. He does speak some truth about the emperor’s ambitions and his failures which have been covertly discussed amongst the imperial elite.”

Pledging her allegiance to a man so closely allied with the Huns who’d ruined her village and her family was a scenario too abhorrent to envision.

Her voice, when she finally found it, sounded hollow and wooden. “Were you ever thinking of—”

Frustration ran thick in Shang’s words, his hand shaking as he passed it over his face. “It’s hard to even think when we’re faced with such circumstances. As a soldier, it is your duty to follow orders. As a commander, you swear fealty to the emperor, take his vision as yours, and carry out his wishes. To have your life saved by a relative who stands on the other side of enemy lines and expects your loyalty for that act is to owe the heavens an impossible debt.”

She nodded thoughtfully, forcing herself to consider the problem rationally, tamping down on the visceral emotional response this subject wrought. Shang’s integrity, his beliefs, his personal sense of responsibility were sorely tested, as were hers. Caught between their oath to the emperor and the ties to family no matter how distant, the pull of each equally was strong; neither should be under- or overestimated.

“It’s often said blood runs thicker than water. But should it override the emperor’s mandate when it comes to a family member to whom you owe your life?”

“Have you ever played chess?”

She frowned at his abrupt change in subject. “I’ve tried. Actually, I’m the worst in my family. I usually lose to my grandmother and father because I make too many impulsive advances. Even my younger brother used to beat me at it.”

A ghost of a smile flitted across his face at her admission. “There are so many players moving their pawns on this board.” He raised a hand and counted off with his fingers. “The emperor, his advisors, the northern dukes, Li Yuan. Unfortunately, we are only soldiers who move when the players tell us to move.”

There was a strange light in his eyes as he took her hand in his, turned her palm upwards and placed a crumpled piece of paper in it.

She read the smudged words, calligraphic in their beauty, curt in its message. Written in Chi Fu’s precise hand, if she could warrant a guess. An imperial edict to the troops.

_Hold the front line. Reinforcements moving in from Taiyuan._

“We’re called to fight.” She barely recognised her own voice as she spoke.

Troubled eyes met hers. “It’s a call to mobilise. To be battle-ready. Our camp happens to be the closest to the border and this unit will form the front line.”

Dread ticked its way up her spine. It could mean several things: a move to counter an anticipated attack, an attempt to advance, an attempt to unify by force. And another night terror to run from in her sleep in the unending run of battles.

In the first few weeks, there had still been some optimism amongst the troops that they would be back in time for the Spring festival. But after the first year had gone, soldiers learned the hard way not to speak of home anymore.

How quickly did it take for her to tire of the bloodshed and the relentless campaigns for land and power?

“And we just relayed the message that Li Yuan was not looking to fight.”

It would take days for that news to reach the palace.”

“Even if it did, emperor and his advisors are not in the habit of negotiating with enemies who they believe can be easily overrun.”

“Then we are too late. We play a fool’s game.”

“Maybe so, maybe not. But until then, we still ride under Yang Di’s banner.” The sudden, feral intensity in his eyes threw her off-balance. “Whatever happens, will you stay by my side?”

“Do you mean in battle—or?”

He shook his head slowly. “Regardless.”

Mulan heard the unspoken questions as clearly as if he’d asked them aloud, unprepared for the wrenching feeling in her stomach and the painful tightness in her chest.

_Would you fight with me? Would you still stay by my side if I chose to join Li Yuan? Would you trust me to make important decisions for the both of us?_

There was no relief from the painful tightness in her chest. He hadn’t even needed to ask. It was a vow she’d readily take for him, regardless of whether it was reciprocal.

But she needed to know, placing her hands on his face instead and asking softly, “Will you stay by mine?”

oOo

The campsite that they left weeks ago had become a completely unrecognisable fortress by the time they rode past its newly-built barricades. What had been parallel rows of white tents laid across the plains stretching as far as the eye could see was now a barren site of upturned earth and fortifications, with hurriedly-constructed edifices behind for the additional stores of grain that must have been sent from the capital.

It was there that they’d agreed to separate, her to where the officers were stationed and he to a meeting with the captains.

The moment she disappeared into the mass of soldiers, Captain Wang Xun approached Shang in the throng of soldiers.

“Word came fast that you had returned. Our eastern scouts have reported an army of Huns moving west, merging again with another troop at the confluence of the Wei tributary,” Wang Xun announced grimly. “Reinforcements arrive in a week. This is more than a raid.”

“How much time do we have?”

“Maybe a week, maybe days. Their numbers grow as they take the trail alongside the rivers. They head south, quickly. My guess, however, is that Tung Shao will again be the central point of focus where the battle will take place.”

A white fog of incomprehension drifted down, clouding his mind as he tried to make sense of the events. Wasn’t Li Yuan adamant that the northern tribes sought peace?

“Wait, I sent a note with the bird. Many of the tribes want to avoid conflict.”

Wang Xun’s confusion was genuine. “And how did you come by that news?”

“It’s a tale better suited for telling when we have the time.”

Wang Xun nodded. “No message was received. At least, there was none that I know of.”

Unease churned his insides as Shang frantically tried to untangle the threads of war and strategy and double-play. A sickening suspicion of the actual state of play was starting to form in his mind, one that kept his vocal cords in a stranglehold as the implications of it unfurled.

He needed to move, to gain access to the palace—as aware as he was that there were different political factions that hindered or progressed certain tactical decisions, would it not be dereliction of duty if he did not at least make Li Yuan’s entreaty known to the palace?

“Then I need to personally relay—.”

Wang Xun’s restraining hand on his breastplate was firm. “There is no way to the emperor and the palace, you know that. These are our orders, Marshal.”

“What else do the scouts say? Who leads them?”

Wang Xun eyed Shang speculatively before answering.

"Some say Shan-Yu. Unconfirmed sightings say that a shadow rider follows him. The elusive. Li Yuan.”


	12. The Move, the Plan, the Fight

Shang moved briskly among the restless soldiers and stepped into the largest tent in the centre of camp. Gathered around the war table were the captains and generals, arguing in low tones about formation and troop deployment.

Some looked eager to talk to him, but only the map and its numerous markings, dirtied from multiple fingerprints, took his attention. The newest information that they’d consolidated from his own scouting journey was imprinted in red—horizontal lines that streaked the top, brown edge of the paper like blood stains on dried grass.

“Marshal Li.” Wang Xun's voice broke the background noise of the captains’ and generals’ low murmurs. “We have had eight days of preparation. These were already more than we could hope for.” A calloused finger pointed at the crumpled leather map, tracing lightly over the familiar routes of battle.

With a long stick, he moved the pawns and the troops, exposing their line of defence…and weakness.

“Twenty _li_ south of the pass is a river bank that had flooded in recent weeks. Villages that stood there before were washed away, leaving the Tung Shao pass our only viable route at this time of year.”

A chill crept up his spine at those words. Inclement weather, contradictory intelligence and troops that seemed unprepared to face the enemy stacked the odds against them.

Had fate cast its die? Were they marching to some inevitable conclusion—the ending of which he could not yet fathom?

Five years ago, his unit had run into a small Hun ambush and barely escaped with their lives if it hadn’t been for Mulan’s stunt with the cannon. But if their scouts had reported a growing mass of warriors gathering, then this sounded like an entirely planned operation that directly went against what Li Yuan had told him.

He huffed in frustration.

Just as the failure of the Gokuryo campaign had proven, the fast-moving, quick-reacting Hun warriors had exposed the imperial army’s underlying weakness in its inability to match their tactical speed, their aptitude in sowing confusion amongst the enemy troops and their ferocious hunger to conquer their conquerors.

Trained as the imperial army’s troops were, they lacked the same savage speed and the tactical advantage these nomadic tribes seemed to have. Many were boys going into battle, not seasoned warriors with years of combat under their belts.

How dire then, was this situation?

Too dire to comprehend and entirely impossible to overhaul within the slow-moving cog of a lumbering wheel that had turned merrily on its own speed for centuries.

He strode further in to join the captains, unable to shrug off that uneasy tingle at the back of his neck.

oOo

Shang found Mulan’s tent easily—pitched away from the rest once again, but not too far away to call to any attention Ping’s deviance when it came to standard protocol—guided by the small ray of yellow light that peeked out from that tent's opening at this late hour when most lamps had been put out.

Just like the old days, as she’d tried to set herself apart from others, not out of pride or arrogance but out of necessity. He understood that now, though the woman who occupied this tent was far from the naïve, clumsy girl who first joined his ranks as Ping all those years ago.

Inside, Mulan was lying on her bed roll, on a crisp white sheet, clad in the neutrals of rough cotton, so still that Shang feared the worst until she shifted and blinked.

He’d initially thought that her eyes were fixed on nothing, until he stepped closer to see her intently tracing the erratic flight path of a bug circling the tapered end of her tent. She sat up just as he bent to kneel beside her, shifting so that he could sit on part of her bedroll.

They sat in silence, the space between the negligible, breathing the same rhythm for several minutes, slow and steady. This proximity, this unaccustomed warmth that pooled low in his gut that he felt when he was with her on the eve of battle—it seemed that his only regret was that he did not pursue this sooner.

“How do you feel?”

He watched her closely, breaking their silence while looking for any sign of discomfort or pain with every movement.

The dark lashes fanned against her cheeks as she blinked and tilted her brows downwards. “Good enough to ride with the rest tomorrow.”

With lips pressed into a thin line, he stilled, struggling between taking the stance of a commanding officer or that of a protective lover when it came to her. Caught between wanting her cocooned far away where her safety would not be the first and foremost care on his mind and knowing that the army required every last able-bodied man for the task set before them.

“I wish I knew—actually, I don’t know what to say to that.”

Gently, she cupped his cheek, softly rubbing her thumb over the lines that radiated from his eyes. “I thought you would ask me to leave camp quietly and immediately.”

The simple act made his breath catch, and for a moment, he felt the sharp sting of guilt for even thinking of sending her away.

“I had considered it,” he admitted, painfully aware of the full armour that was neatly laid out next to her roll, of the constraining cloth hidden beneath them, of the gleaming sword and bow that were stacked next to her helmet. “Not because you’re a woman. But because of your injuries and because I don’t think I could bear seeing anything happen to you.”

He saw the unmistakable gleam in her eyes, the stubborn tilt of her jaw.

“Didn’t you ask me to be by your side? I’m riding out tomorrow to honour this promise. And did you think that I would be able to stand aside and not worry about your safety?”

He gave her a wry grin. “I also know that the army needs Ping and I should not be so foolish as to keep one of my trained warriors from marching out to battle when he has earned the soldiers’ respect through his own merits and skills.”

Riding out at the frontlines doubled their risk of never returning. With unpredictable weather conditions and an enemy that seemed so fluid in tactics and leadership, was there ever a chance that they would survive this?

“You’re troubled.”

He thought back to the nights before riding out to war—the deeply-unsettled feeling that plagued him until daybreak, the restlessness that couldn’t be shaken off, the creeping dread that soon replaced the initial sense of excitement.

“I cannot see a good outcome,” he confessed, taking her hands in his.

Her returning squeeze was comforting but tentative. “Let’s try thinking about it differently. Maybe we should talk about what happens after.”

“ _After_ …?”

It sounded so much like a word spoken under water—vaguely familiar but ultimately inconceivable.

“After the battle.”

The thought of an _after_ was perplexing. In all his years as a soldier, Shang had learned to think of _after_ less and less. Aftermaths came incidentally and it was rote by now to consider each aftermath as yet another occasion where he’d ridden back into camp alive when others didn’t.

Consequently, life had become a relentless cycle of preparing for the next war or the next march to battle. Nothing else took priority except for the single-minded will to serve the imperial army the way his father did. Home wasn’t the sprawling estate that he’d been raised in, but a movable tent that he pitched on grass and mud.

Only until Ping had turned into Mulan and his encounter with Li Yuan did he really begin to consider that each battle came with its own exorbitant price. That all it had taken were mere twists and revelations in his previously-ordered life to rethink his rigid stance about filial duty and honour.

He chose to be frank as he soaked in every detail of her. “There may not be an _after_ for us.”

She looked intently at him. “I know that. We both do. But what if there is?”

He sighed, letting his head hang, coaxing his mind into envisioning a new morning without the burden of duty. Still he faltered, struggling against the very rules that caged him, the newly-formed sense of entrapment he felt, yet trying to articulate this very new turn that his mind had taken.

“All my life, I only saw my father living for edict after edict. For years, I thought it was the highest honour to be able to do the same. But today, on the eve of riding out, I find myself praying to the ancestors for a different path. I was born into a life such as this. How many have the privilege of looking another way and not dishonouring the family name?”

“Why would it be wrong? You have given your adult life in service to the emperor, carried on your father’s legacy. That alone honours your family.” She frowned in consternation. “But to be caught in a position like this is a terrible thing.”

“There is…there is—” He shook his head, as though testing the idea aloud was treasonous. “I’ve never felt more inclined to…leave.”

“To leave…the imperial troops?”

The lack of surprise on Mulan’s face in turn, surprised him. Had he unconsciously been expecting some form of condemnation from her?

“Leave and be free from the political trappings of war. Free from the constant fighting and bloodshed, from the dreams I have at night of men dying everywhere. I cannot stop thinking of it.”

“I’ve started to think that keeping the peace is a noble aim in life. More noble than spending years wielding a sword to cut down the enemy,” she whispered, as though an admission such as this was a shameful secret. “I tire of battles and fighting. Getting hurt every time it happens. Wondering if the next body that falls to the ground is going to be mine.”

The pang in his chest bloomed into a physical ache. “Don’t say that.”

A small, sly smile curved her mouth. “What shall we talk about then? The lot that you will have to give up if you leave? Further promotion, monetary rewards, eligible young women who will be queuing to meet you—”

Shang cupped a hand over her mouth, smiling at the hushed giggles that escaped her. Grateful for that short moment of levity.

But he understood the impetus and the seriousness behind those words. She’d left so much behind and then had all that was left taken from her until there was no choice but to come back to what she knew.

“But you will be there. And that is all that matters.”

Because it wasn’t Ping he faced now…the cryptic and enigmatic Ping he thought he’d known, but Mulan, the woman who carved open in him new longings and desires and possibilities. And it was her—and that amazing strength that she carried inside and out—that bolstered him.

“I promised you I would.” She nodded slowly, tentatively. “I was thinking maybe we could even ride west. Into the highlands where grass turns to desert. Or stay, in a lonely province far from the imperial bastions.”

For a second, Shang allowed himself to see through her eyes, trying to imagine the way nomads answered the persistent call of the ancient landscape that made them move, such that they led lives pared down to extremes.

He thought about the unchanging, quiet life of the farmers, of waking and working with the seasons, his sword, bow and armour buried deep in a chest, gathering dust.

Could they do the same? Could it really be that simple?

He got up, rummaged through a satchel and brought out a brush and paper.

“When this is over, we leave,” he told her with a note of finality. Maybe our names will be erased from the annals, from the records, from the imperial army, maybe not. But let this be our last battle.”

“Our last battle.” It was both an echo and a promise that he heard from her.

They left its implications unspoken—that it could be their last time in the field ever, with every chance that neither of them would see tomorrow’s sunset.

“Then let tonight be a memory that we’ll always have.”

His pulse was pounding hard in his ears as she pulled him down, her hips framing his legs in a move more intimate than a kiss. Their lips touched lightly as fabric and resistance fell away, as promises were etched upon bare skin. All else winked sideways, all thought disintegrating.

oOo

The Hunnic advance was a black sweeping wave that undulated with each curve of the terrain, disappearing and reappearing with each peak and trough.

Standing with the other officers with the bulky helmet concealing half her face, Mulan watched in silence, the petrified awe of the soldiers around her a thick, tangible entity that felt as though it could be cleaved in two by a sharp blade.

The fires in crudely-fashioned metal bowls cast a dim, orange glow in front of the archers, the spitting flames defiantly loud in the light drizzle and rising mist that shrouded them. Low-level flood waters raced around their horses’ hooves, the thickening sludge agitating the animals that couldn’t seem to keep still.

A few rows behind her, Shang sat atop his steed, unmoving as the icy wind whipped at his cape. The sword in his hand gleamed silver, raised partway as the troops snapped into formation.

A ferocious weather system of drenching rains and frigid winds arriving in the thick of night had swept all that was loose on the ground into a river of mud on parts of the pass to render it inaccessible.

The sudden flood had carved a flat, adjacent path left of it instead, burrowing new inlets, flooding ancient caves and widened existing ones, reforming the miniscule landscape into an almost level but winding maze of a battlefield.

Still, the Huns pushed forward, parting the flood waters like avenging demons.

The gleam of a raised sword and a hoarse shout from Zhi Hui shattered the silence.

_Draw._

Archers dipped their arrows into the bowls of fire, nocked them tight on their bows.

_Pull._

Mulan drew her bowstring taut and angled it against the sky, feeling its tension radiating through her fingers and forearm.

 _Release_.

The released arrows whistled a deafening whine, their trajectory through the sky momentarily curtaining it with dark, pinstriped lines with burning heads as the grey sky suddenly split with the flash of lightning.

The black wave faltered, its edges crumbling into bursts of yellow sparks as the first line of soldiers on horseback fell into the mist and snow. But the advancing mass rapidly took shape again, sending its own arc of arrows winging through the sky.

Around her, the thud of bodies crumpled around her, their screams of pain deafening.

With the next dizzying exchange of arrows, more fell.

Still, the order held.

_Hold…hold the line._

Still they waited, the horses whinnying in protest, their reins pulled even tighter by fists gone bloodless.

The sound of the gong resonated through the ranks as the sharp cry finally came—

_Move in._

All hell broke loose.

Her horse pushed forward, lost in the swarming cloud of fire, arrows and the clash of metal against metal as man after man fell face down into the mud.

Mulan ploughed through the twisting bodies, stumbling over the rapidly-gaining mudflow, slashing as hard as she could, drawing blood with each swing of her blade.

Next to her, a spear flew to embed itself into the neck of a rider. He crumpled, torn away from his horse—

She cut her way through the Hun army, tightening her grip on the reins to urge the horse past the swelling tide of the melting snow. From the corner of her eye, she saw Zhi Hui crash into a large, bearded Hun rider, tangling on the ground as their blades clattered away from them.

To her left, a soldier lay face down in the mud, his head next to him piked straight through a spear. To her right, a man uselessly tried to stem the blood that spurted from an arm and a knee. In front and behind, mangled bodies littered the ground, mercilessly trampled on by galloping horses and advancing foot soldiers.

Despite the cold, sweat beaded on her forehead, her vision turning fuzzy. Disorientation set in; in the anarchy and the chaos, her horse slowed as she tilted, swung downwards, and scooped up a fallen axe to hurl at an oncoming rider.

Her hand buckled and the axe flew wide, landing harmlessly on the ground. He rode towards her, sword held out—

At the last moment, she ducked again, narrowly missing the pointed blade aimed at her throat before whirling the horse around a full hundred-and-eighty to counter the thrust with a stab into her attacker’s ribcage.

The blade cracked bone and tore through sinew, coming through a bright red that splattered on her face and breastplate. Bile rose in her throat as he collapsed and rolled to a dead stop. Her eyes hurt as she stared at him, feeling the dull pulsing behind them, as though the midday sun had shone too brightly.

But there was nothing like that here, nothing so bright…just snow and cold and running water.

A familiar sound pricked her ears. A familiar voice, with a cadence she knew well by now.

_Was that…?_

Had someone called her name as though from a distance? It sounded like a voice that was barely discernible, that dented the din of battle… _was it Shang_?

Was he even alive?

He _had_ to be…they’d sworn that after the battle, things would change, hadn’t they? A brand-new future, a life elsewhere, with him…it was this very thought that helped the mental mist dissipate.

Then there it was again…that hoarse shout of her name, her birth name.

Only one man knew it.

Turning the horse towards the sound—

Her stallion reared, a flaming arrow protruding from its neck, flinging her into the air and straight to the edge of a precipice that hung over a series of narrow ledges before falling sharply away into nothingness.

Shan-Yu stood before her, his eyes glinting in recognition.

Quickly, she rolled to her side just as he arced his sabre downwards.

Her sword flew from her hand.

She crawled towards it just as his hand closed around her ankle, sending her back onto the ground, chest first. Her breath torn from her, she lay unmoving for a few seconds—only managing to roll the other way to avoid a kick to her ribs.

But giving Shan-Yu time to recover his wits would be her costliest mistake.

Blinking away the dizziness, she heaved herself up and lunged at him, heedless of the pain that came from tearing the newly-healing skin of her back, sweeping a leg to keep him from standing. Instead, Shan-Yu ploughed straight at her with a force that sent her hitting the ground again.

The resinous scent of snow, water and mud wafted past her nostrils as she got up, ducked, wove and deflected, barely able to block the unrelenting blows from his fists. Sword gone, she drew both her long knives, slashing at Shan-Yu, forcing him to parry each move.

They edged closer to the precipice as Shan-Yu backpedalled. She pushed further, a step forward, another blow, then another step forward—

Weakened by water stress, the narrow ledge crumbled and fell beneath their combined weight.

oOo

Shang thought of nothing as he rode through the mass of soldiers except for the need to drive them back. For the men he’d downed as he ran his sabre through them, as the fires exploded around him, he felt nothing but the icy wind lashing his face, the helmet providing scant protection from the elements.

Muscle memory and countless hours of conditioning had made his movements rote, hyperawareness narrowing his field of vision and amplifying every sound.

“Marshal!”

He whirled at the sound of his name, scarcely blocking a downward swing of a Hun rider’s blade—

A flaming arrow embedded itself in his attacker’s eye.

Wang Xun sat atop his horse, bow taut with another flaming arrow nocked on it. Shang nodded his thanks.

It was a familiar pattern that soon established itself: the fight that he took to each Hun soldier, saving his soldiers’ lives and limbs when he could, then having his own saved by others.

Like him, the troops slowly advanced, then took some paces back, repetition building fatigue as men upon men fell like flies.

His arm beneath the armour had been slashed open, his shoulder out of joint too many times to count, yet whatever pain he should have felt was held at bay by the rapid beating of his heart and the flood of adrenaline that made his legs unsteady.

The low mist lifted slightly as he finally steered the horse into higher ground, clearing enough for him to see over the next rise, where two figures struggled to gain a hold over each other.

They wrestled, grappled, twisted in the mud and snow. A Hun and a slight soldier wearing the imperial army battle garb, engaged in a style of combat that bore little resemblance to the type of warrior-training that the military conducted.

His skin prickled, the harsh rasp of his breaths filling his ears as recognition dawned—the fighting stance of the smaller soldier was that of a woman who’d shown him all of herself, told him her story and earned her skills against all odds.

Shang dug his heels deep into the horse’s flank, the beast shooting forward in a gallop that steered him around the side of a pass before he reached them. Keeping his eyes on Mulan, he urged the horse faster—

Rock and earth loosened and crumbled before his eyes, both the soldiers disappearing under the sudden rockfall.

Her scream reached his ears, cut off abruptly by a faint thud—

“Mulan!”

Shang scrambled off his horse, sprinted to the edge as far as he dared and fell to his knees, murmuring a desperate prayer to the ancestors.

There were several ledges beneath the edge, weren’t there? At least it was what he’d seen as he rounded the pass…it hadn’t been a sharp drop down… she couldn’t have plummeted into the abyss just because…because…

Shang crept further forward as much as he dared, squinted into the abyss and yelled her name.

He only saw a cloud of dust from the rockfall as the mist shrouded everything below the precipice. Robbed painfully of breath, his heart in his throat, he leaned forward for a glimpse— _any_ glimpse—of where she’d landed.

Silence.

“Mulan!”

_Oh no, no, no…please, ancestors, no…not her, not now…please, let her live, I’ll do anything…anything—_

Was the sound of that anguished cry coming from him? The wetness on his cheeks that spilled onto his hands? The hoarseness in his voice from desperately shouting her name over and over?

To his left, a sudden scrabbling sound made him turn sharply. At the steep edge of the precipice, a broken, bloodied hand unsteadily grabbed the sharp edge of the rock.

Mulan’s other hand finally swung around, the head of Shan Yu gripped tightly in her fingers.


	13. All Things New

Mulan had no memory of sleeping, but she must have slipped into deep slumber at some point in time. She drew herself straight, blinking away the vestiges of slumber to slowly take in where she was.

A tiled roof, roughly-hewn furniture, regularly-spaced timber posts, sturdy walls, a small fire stove over which a pot hung. A wide, comfortable cot that belied their sparse surroundings, lined with furs and spare cloth.

“You shouldn’t be up.” Said a voice that she would recognise anywhere. “Rest.”

“It seems like that’s all you’ve been saying to me for a while.”

“It’s only because you need it.”

That had been Shang’s constant refrain for a while now; at first, she’d slipped in and out of sleep, comforted by the warm hand on her forehead each time he said it. But having surfaced from the most recent numbness that had cocooned her, she found herself restless to do something else other than forced recuperation.

“Where are we?”

He looked around ruefully. “A place where we are away from prying eyes. It was the best I could do in our circumstances.”

Only then did she see the cotton-tunic that Shang wore, exhaustion clearly written on his face. Without the armour, he seemed…smaller somehow, more human, less the stoic, unbending military commander she’d first known. Like her, his robes were plain, simple, almost like a mourner’s garb without any embellishment detailing its hem.

“What happened?”

“You don’t remember?” He asked curiously.

She closed her eyes, letting everything she recalled flit by, even though those scenes seemed rimmed black and indistinct around the edges. “I remember some things.”

She remembered that the rains finally stopped as the rivers swelled and flooded the plains. That with many dead, many injured, their blood drenching red what was formerly pristine ice, white and pure, there had been no resounding victory on either side.

That the Huns retreated, leaving a decimated army to pick up its pieces on the flooded ruins surrounding the Tung Shao pass.

That Li Yuan had never been found. Or if he had even been a part of the battle at all.

Slightly less clear was the part where she’d insisted on carrying Shan-Yu’s head back, half-conscious as they returned to camp and used it as barter for their release from the imperial army. That they’d written two letters, with two-hastily-scrawled signatures, curt and to the point, to show their clear intention of retiring from their roles in active combat. That Chi Fu had been struck speechless for once.

That the only constant in the chaotic days after the battle was Shang and what he did to bring them both here.

But the exact details were lost to her.

Shang nodded to it all, as she told him what she recalled. “You were injured and fatigued, pushed past your point of endurance. Your wounds from the whip had reopened, but even in your delirious state, you managed to demand of Chi Fu that no surgeon tended to you except to give you something to numb the pain.”

She brushed away a smattering of hair that curled around his neck and shoulders as he bent over her to help her up. “It had to stay that way.”

“I know. The troops hailed you as a hero. You would have blushed at their praise and the bounties they promised.”

“Wine and women?” A sardonic smile crept onto her face.

He paused, as though struggling with the right words to say. “You told me not too long ago that I would be giving up a lot. But maybe you should also think about what this means for you, if you decide to leave. There is an illustrious career for you in the army, Mulan. If only you let them know who you really are.”

For a while, she didn’t say anything, weighing his statement against what could be on the _other_ side of constant deployment and unending war. But death had also been part of that constant that she wanted to be free of…that same fatigue and frustration and helplessness that assailed Shang was one that she keenly felt too.

“That is no longer my ambition.” Her tone was resolute, hoping that her words were enough to convince him. “Besides, we made our decision together. Let us not go back on it.”

Silence was her only answer, but it wasn’t an awkward or angry one. He merely watched her for a long while as she fought to draw back the foggy curtain of sleep.

Finally, he nodded. “Then let me show you something.”

Shang lifted her out of bed and carried her outside despite her protests, gently setting her in the horse’s saddle before climbing up into the space behind her and urging the horse into a slight trot.

They rode out as the dim winter sun’s rays dappled thin branches onto the ground and cast the landscape in a golden glow, finally stopping at an elevated lookout that opened out into an expanse of hills and valleys bisected by a flowing, meandering river.

She saw a landscape made new.

Familiar yet unfamiliar, in the wake of the storms that lashed the plains and valleys. The mountains still stood, yet seemed diminished in the wake of a battle that had taken too many lives.

To the east, the remnants of what was once a great unit had assembled, their standard bearer already riding far into the distance, away from them.

“They return to Luoyang.”

A sharp exhale escaped her lips at the sight of the soldiers.

More importantly, its implications: a slate wiped clean, a future yet unwritten.

Shang’s grip tightened around her waist, his head bowed slightly into her neck.

She reached back, touched the back of his head gently. “No regrets.”

From the outcropping, they watched in silence as the troops marched on.

**-Fin**

**Postscript:**

_After 3 years, Li Yuan's successful capture of Chang-An with allied northern forces and Yang Di's hanging by one of his own ministers propelled China into one of the most remembered Dynasties of all time. Li Yuan himself took the name emperor Gaozu of Tang._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When I wrote the original version of ‘Times that Taint’, I hadn’t known there was going to be a Mulan 2, where Shang/Mulan ended up together. The original story’s ending was one where Shang and Mulan separated with a very faint hope of them reuniting…someday in the future. 
> 
> The aim of the story—war, violence, and unacknowledged, repressed feelings—hasn’t changed, but I thought this rewritten version should stay truer to the pairing that Disney had put in stone. In light of that, I wanted this story to be about Shang and Mulan, all the way to the end, though not in the typical way Disney would even conceive of an ending. 
> 
> Also, leaving this to stew for over 15 years while I explored other fandoms taught me a lot of things about what HEAs meant, how relationships had been and should have been written. Most importantly, it’s taught me about the nature about fanfiction itself, which is in its broadest meaning, a fan-fuelled discourse of gratitude, dissatisfaction and yearning—gifts of love for and from the community. ‘Times that Taint’ is as always, a tribute to this gender-bending tale of a female soldier (and the men in her life) that I can’t seem to get enough of. 
> 
> Thanks for reading.


	14. Timeline and Historical Notes

**Actual timeline of events leading up to 589 A.D:**

50 years of conflict with the northern tribes and the Turks. Unification of south, peace made with Eastern and Western Turks, support given by northern nomadic nomads for a unified China.

An emperor of mixed northern blood ascends the throne in 589 A.D, known as Yang Jian and later, Wen Di. He ascended when he deposed the child ruler of the previous Northern Zhou dynasty, securing his position after killing 59 princes of the Zhou house. He then sought to legitimate his position by presenting himself as a Buddhist _cakravartin king,_ a monarch who uses force to defend the Buddhist faith.

 **604 A.D** Death of Emperor Wen, suspected murder by his own son Yang Di who ascended the throne. Yang Di drives back northern tribes who pressed the border.

 **605 610 A.D** Yang Di begins the massive undertaking of the Grand Canal construction, a 1795 km long canal that runs North/South, connecting the Yellow River, the Yangtze River and the Huai River that ran West/East.

 **609 A.D** A turning point in the reign of Yang Di, who became increasingly preoccupied with foreign expansion at the expense of dealing with domestic problems.

 **610 A.D** I deliberately placed the Hun Battle in Disney's _Mulan_ here.

 **612 - 614 A.D** Yang Di leads unsuccessful campaigns against Gokuryo, where the Chinese Army suffered heavy losses.

 **615 A.D** Central Asian Turks once again invade Border Region. China crumbles when nomadic people establish control over the northern plains, bandit gangs emerged, provincial governors declared themselves rulers, uprising of peasant armies.

 _Time that Taint_ is written in this time period (615 A.D — about 3 years before the establishment of the Tang Dynasty), where I get to slip Mulan into the Central Asian Tribes and the Silk Road, and Shang into the Korean Campaign (in the period 610 - 615) and get both of them to tackle once again, the Hun invasions.

 **617 A.D** Yang Di in exile in Yangzhou and there is continuing political strife for the throne.

 **618 A.D** Yang Di is hung by one of his own ministers. Li Yuan, the governor of Taiyuan, allied with a Turkish force, took over Chang-an and proclaimed himself Emperor, signalling the start of the Tang Dynasty. Chang'an, or Xi'An, became the new capital and over the next few years, the Tang army subsequently wiped out peasant and local separatist forces.

oOo

**A bit of background on the Huns:**

_The Huns are nomadic Asian people, probably of Turkish, Tataric, or Ugrian origins, who spread from the Caspian steppes (the areas north of the Caspian Sea) to make repeated incursions into the Roman Empire during the 4th and 5th centuries AD. These attacks culminated in a series of wars under Attila, the most renowned of its leaders that brought both parts of the Roman Empire, East and West, to the verge of destruction._

_At the height of their power the Huns absorbed a number of different racial strains in their armies and assimilated the characteristics of the populations of their environment, so that in Europe they gradually lost their distinct Asian character; but even in their pre-European period they were highly variable in their physical characteristics, and of no easily determined ethnic or linguistic identity. All accounts, however, agree in describing them as an aggressive nomadic people of great vigour and comparatively low cultural achievement, who had developed considerable skill in the techniques of warfare, particularly in military horsemanship._


End file.
